Ricerc@Sapienza

The pandemic acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), named COVID-19 [1], is generating a severe health emergency all over the world but particularly in some countries. The healthcare challenge is to provide assistance to the increasing number of infected patients, to contain ways of transmission and at the same time to treat all the non-deferrable medical conditions that continue to affect the population. Moreover, the most relevant problems are in the management of all first aid accesses and emergencies other than COVID-19.

Oxalates stimulate alterations in renal epithelial cells and thereby induce calcium oxalate (CaOx) stone formation. Bacillus subtilis YvrK gene encodes for oxalate decarboxylase (OxdC) which degrades oxalate to formate and CO2. The present work is aimed to clone the oxdC gene in a mammalian expression vector pcDNA and transfect into Human Embryonic Kidney 293 (HEK293) cells and evaluate the oxdC expression, cell survival rate and oxalate degrading efficiency. The results indicate cell survival rate of HEK293/pcDNAOXDC cells pre-incubated with oxalate was enhanced by 28%.