---
title: "Mini-Organ Research Reveals What COVID-19 Does to the Body"
description: "Scientists are infecting mini-organs with COVID-19 to better understand how the virus infects and interacts with human organs."
date: "2020-06-22"
modified: "2020-06-22"
authors:
  - name: "Dan Robitzski"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/danrobitzski"
url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/mini-organ-research-reveals-covid19-body"
categories:
  - "Health & Medicine"
  - "Medical"
  - "Pathogens"
  - "Viruses"
tags:
  - "coronavirus"
  - "covid19"
  - "medicine"
  - "organoids"
---

# Mini-Organ Research Reveals What COVID-19 Does to the Body

![Scientists are infecting mini-organs with COVID-19 to better understand how the virus infects and interacts with human organs.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mini-organ-research-reveals-covid19-body.jpg>)
*\<em\>Image: Bing Zhao\</em\>*

In order to understand how COVID-19 spreads throughout the body, ravaging it in myriad ways, doctors are growing miniature balls or organ-like tissue called "organoids," and infecting them again and again.

The results, *[Nature News ](<https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01864-x>)*[reports](<https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01864-x>), are particularly troubling: the miniature lungs, livers, kidneys, hearts, intestines all showed signs of damage. The series of studies reveals with shocking clarity that COVID-19 can cause far more than a lung infection.

Of course, that's not exactly news. This harrowing list of survivors' and medical workers' horror stories [gathered by *SFGate*](<https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/What-they-don-t-tell-you-about-surviving-15347792.php>) includes heart attacks, strokes, long-term lung damage, incontinence, skin damage, and other serious complications for supposed "mild" cases of the coronavirus:

https://twitter.com/sheriantoinette/status/1272146291250933760

That's just one of the [many, many stories they gathered](<https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/What-they-don-t-tell-you-about-surviving-15347792.php>) about the ways a road to "recovery" from COVID-19 is neither linear nor something that shouldn't be feared.

That said, for all their benefits, [organoids are still imperfect.](<https://futurism.com/scientists-grew-human-brains-robots>) Per *Nature*, they're far more simplistic than a full-sized organ. And because they're not all connected in the same body, doctors can only use them to study the impacts on a single organ in isolation.

"We know the cells die but we don't know how," Weill Cornell Medicine stem cell biologist Shuibing Chen told *Nature* of her study on miniature lungs.

Even though questions remain, it's clear those impacts are serious. Various studies found that the coronavirus caused serious damage in several organs, and may lead to indirect damage in others. It also became clear that the coronavirus can infect and spread through blood vessels, leading to a more serious, widespread case.

To figure that out, biologists will need to develop more sophisticated and realistic organoids and try their experiments again, *Nature* reports.

"It is too early to say how relevant they are," Bart Haagmans, an Erasmus MC virologist who ran a study on gut organoids, told *Nature*.

## Author
Dan Robitzki is a senior reporter for Futurism, where he likes to cover AI, tech ethics, and medicine. He spends his extra time fencing and streaming games from Los Angeles, California.

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://x.com/danrobitzski>)