Treatment with the senolytics dasatinib/quercetin reduces SARS-CoV-2-related mortality in mice

The enormous societal impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly harsh for some social groups, such as the elderly. Recently, it has been suggested that senescent cells could play a central role in pathogenesis by exacerbating the pro-inflammatory immune response against SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, the selective clearance of senescent cells by senolytic drugs may be useful as a therapy to ameliorate the symptoms of COVID-19 in some cases. Using the established COVID-19 murine model K18-hACE2, we demonstrated that a combination of the senolytics dasatinib and quercetin (D/Q) significantly reduced SARS-CoV-2-related mortality, delayed its onset, and reduced the number of other clinical symptoms. The increase in senescent markers that we detected in the lungs in response to SARS-CoV-2 may be related to the post-COVID-19 sequelae described to date. These results place senescent cells as central targets for the treatment of COVID-19, and make D/Q a new and promising therapeutic tool.
This work was supported by grants from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII), COV20-00755 (C.V.K.) and COV20-00792 (M.B., M.A.R.), Apadrina la Ciencia (C.S., C.O., G.G.A.), the AECC Scientific Foundation, PRDMA18011PAST, SIRTBIO- LABAE18008FERN (P.J.F.M., A.P., A.S.R.), the RETOS projects Programme of Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN), SAF2017-85766-R and PID2020-114077RB-I00 (P.J.F.M., A.P., A.S.R.), Ramon y Cajal Award from MICINN, RYC-2017-22335 (P.J.F.M., A.P., A.S.R.), Proyecto REACT from REACT/European Union/FEDER, COVTRAVI-19-CM U (J.M.S., M.F., N.G.), grant from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), CSIC-COV19-014 (A.I.d.Á), PID2020-113888RB-I00 from MICINN (A.I.d.Á), and the European Commission–Next Generation EU (regulation EU 2020/2094), through the CSIC's Global Health Platform (PTI+ Global Health) (A.I.d.Á). The RT–qPCR reactions were provided by the Genomics and NGS Core Facility (GENGS) at the Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa (CBMSO, CSIC-UAM) Madrid, Spain, which obtains general funding from both institutions. The GENGS facility is part of the PTI+ Global Health (CSIC) (http://www.cbm.uam.es/genomica).