Recent retrospective studies of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) disease (COVID‐19) revealed that the patients with common comorbidities of cancers and chronic diseases face significantly poorer clinical outcomes than those without. Since the expression profile of ACE2, a crucial cell entry receptor for SARS‐CoV‐2, could indicate the susceptibility to SARS‐CoV‐2 infection, here we systematically dissected ACE2 expression using large‐scale multi‐omics data from 30 organs/tissues, 33 cancer types and some common chronic diseases involving >28 000 samples. It was found that sex and age could be correlated with the susceptibility of SARS‐CoV‐2 infection for certain tissues. Strikingly, ACE2 was up‐regulated in cervical squamous cell carcinoma and endocervical adenocarcinoma, colon adenocarcinoma, oesophageal carcinoma, kidney renal papillary cell carcinoma, lung adenocarcinoma and uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma compared to controls. Furthermore, the patients with common chronic diseases regarding angiocardiopathy, type 2 diabetes, liver, pneumonia and hypertension were also with higher ACE2 expression compared to related controls, which were validated using independent data sets. Collectively, our study may reveal a novel important mechanism that the patients with certain cancers and chronic diseases may express higher ACE2 expression compared to the individuals without diseases, which could lead to their higher susceptibility to multi‐organ injury of SARS‐CoV‐2 infection.

中文翻译：

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对 COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 不同生理和病理条件下 ACE2 表达进行系统分析。


最近对严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 2 (SARS-CoV-2) 疾病 (COVID-19) 的回顾性研究表明，患有癌症和慢性疾病常见合并症的患者的临床结果明显比没有合并症的患者差。由于 ACE2（SARS-CoV-2 的关键细胞进入受体）的表达谱可以表明对 SARS-CoV-2 感染的易感性，因此我们在这里使用来自 30 个器官/组织的大规模多组学数据系统地剖析了 ACE2 的表达、33种癌症类型和一些常见慢性病，涉及>28 000个样本。研究发现，性别和年龄可能与某些组织感染 SARS-CoV-2 的易感性相关。引人注目的是，与对照组相比，ACE2在宫颈鳞状细胞癌、宫颈内膜腺癌、结肠腺癌、食道癌、肾乳头状细胞癌、肺腺癌和子宫体子宫内膜癌中表达上调。此外，与相关对照相比，患有心血管疾病、2型糖尿病、肝脏、肺炎和高血压等常见慢性疾病的患者的ACE2表达也较高，这一点已使用独立数据集进行了验证。总的来说，我们的研究可能揭示了一个新的重要机制，即患有某些癌症和慢性疾病的患者可能比未患病的个体表达更高的 ACE2 表达，这可能导致他们对 SARS-CoV-2 感染的多器官损伤的易感性更高。