Study: Hamsters the ideal guinea pigs for treating COVID-19
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Hamsters and humans develop the same type of pneumonia from novel coronavirus infections, showing that the animals are prime test subjects for potential remedies and vaccines, a University of Tokyo study found.
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The research team led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a professor at the university’s Institute of Medical Science, took the novel coronavirus from human patients and injected it into the nostrils of hamsters.
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The study showed the virus tends to proliferate in the respiratory tracts and lungs of the hamsters.
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The researchers confirmed through CT images that all 12 tested hamsters had pneumonia characteristics similar to the ones in infected human patients.
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The pneumonia symptoms appeared around the second day after the hamsters were infected. Around the sixth to eighth day, the symptoms worsened, and then the animals recovered.
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Twenty days later after the infections, the recovered hamsters were given the virus again.
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But the team could not detect the virus in the lungs and the nostrils of the hamsters, indicating that they had developed resistances.
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The new coronavirus has been confirmed to infect rhesus macaques, cats and ferrets. But the infections cause different symptoms among the species.
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Small animals that are easy to handle and show symptoms similar to those of humans are needed for drug research.
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The university’s study shows that hamsters, which were prone to infections of the coronavirus of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), could be great test animals for COVID-19 treatments.
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