Research identifies cause and potential treatment for COVID-19-induced heart damage

QIMR Berghofer researchers have discovered some of the ways COVID-19 damages the heart, and identified a class of drugs that could potentially protect or reverse this cardiac injury.

In severe cases of COVID-19, the immune system overreacts to the infection, releasing inflammatory molecules called cytokines into the bloodstream. This so-called ’cytokine storm’ can damage multiple organs, including the heart.

Canadian company Resverlogix has used the QIMR Berghofer research findings as the basis for expanding its clinical trial of the drug, apabetalone, in COVID-19 patients.

Apabetalone belongs to a new class of drugs that has been in clinical trials for cardiovascular disease for more than five years. It has received breakthrough therapy designation from the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration. Resverlogix initially planned to study apabetalone to improve clinical status in SARS-CoV-2 infected patients, but will now also examine if it can treat heart damage.

The head of QIMR Berghofer’s Cardiac Bioengineering Research Group, Associate Professor James Hudson, said his team used thousands of lab-grown, miniature human heart organoids to understand how COVID-19 causes cardiac damage.

“We wanted to find out exactly how the cytokine storm causes cardiac damage by identifying the proteins responsible, and then try to repurpose existing drugs targeting those proteins,” Associate Professor Hudson said.

“We thought understanding the biological basis of the heart damage was critical for identifying drugs with a much higher chance of success.

“We exposed the bioengineered, stem-cell-derived heart tissue to COVID-19 patient blood and found it caused dysfunction even when the virus didn’t infect the tissue.

“These experiments revealed which inflammatory factors are potentially causing the cardiac problems. These factors activate bromodomain protein 4 in the heart, which we found was the key driver of cytokine storm damage.

“We then used our mini heart organoids to screen several existing drugs that inhibit this protein and found they can prevent and reverse the damage.

“One of these was apabetalone, which was also effective at blocking the inflammatory response. Because it is already in phase III clinical trials for treating cardiovascular disease, it could be available sooner to treat COVID-19 patients.”

Associate Professor Hudson said the laboratory tests showed apabetalone also decreased the expression of the receptor protein ACE2, which is found on the cell surface and is used by the SARS-CoV-2 virus to infect cells.

“Inhibiting the expression of the ACE2 receptor with apabetalone also led to a lower viral infection, which in turn decreased heart damage in our lab experiments,” he said.

“It’s great to be working with Resverlogix to progress this research to a clinical trial to test if apabetalone can be safely used to prevent the terrible organ damage seen in COVID-19 patients around the world.”