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Nature Medicine 11, 821 - 822 (2005)
doi:10.1038/nm0805-821

Good ACE, bad ACE do battle in lung injury, SARS

John Nicholls1 & Malik Peiris1

  1. John Nicholls is in the Department of Pathology, The University of Hong Kong and Malik Peiris in the Department of Microbiology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR. e-mail: nicholls@pathology.hku.hk


Two studies show how the enzyme ACE2 protects against lung injury caused by SARS and other agents. ACE2 seems to counteract the effects of ACE, which are more damaging (pages 875–879).


In 1918, as World War I came to a close, clinicians and pathologists tried to come to grips with an unusual new pneumonic illness. In the lungs of the individuals who died of this illness they found "homogeneous structureless non-cellular exudates which fills the bronchioles and...forms as it were a plastering round the inside of the alveoli...and is very similar to that which can be seen in fatal cases of poisoning by chlorine gas"1.