November 6, 2020

expert reaction to study looking at pre-existing coronavirus antibodies

A study published in Science looks at pre-existing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in humans.

Dr Julian Tang, Honorary Associate Professor/Clinical Virologist, Respiratory Sciences, University of Leicester, said:

“This is a timely study as we enter the second COVID-19 wave and another lockdown.

“Actually I have been referring to this phenomenon for several months when talking to various reporters – whereby pre-existing antibodies developed to seasonal ‘common cold’ coronaviruses (OC43, 229E, NL63, HKU1) may cross-react with and impact on the severity of disease and possibly the viral shedding duration of COVID-19 patients.

“The stronger cross-reactive response in children is not that surprising, as they would have had more recent primary exposure to these seasonal coronaviruses than adults (so retaining a more reactive response) – simply because they are much younger, so their immune systems are more ‘primed’ to deal with the new COVID-19 virus. This may explain why children appear to be so unaffected by COVID-19.

“In fact we’ve known about this cross-reactive behaviour of these seasonal coronavirus antibodies with the earlier SARS 2003 virus for many years now:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1287763/ 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2095096/ 

“So the same phenomenon with SARS-CoV-2 is not so surprising – and these earlier studies also showed more cross-reactivity between the SARS 2003 virus with one particular common cold virus called coronavirus OC43, which may also be the case in this new study with SARS-CoV-2.

“This immune cross-reactivity may work in both directions. So a new COVID-19 vaccine may also offer some cross-protection against some of the seasonal ‘common cold’ coronaviruses, though this may be quite variable depending on the level of individual response to the vaccine and to which specific seasonal coronavirus people are exposed.

“In fact, virologist have been talking about a vaccine for the common cold for many decades. So it is fortuitous (and completely unexpected) that a vaccine against a new pandemic coronavirus may help to partially fulfil this wish. However, several other quite different viruses can also cause the common cold, such as rhinoviruses, which are not expected to affect or be impacted upon by the COVID-19 virus vaccine.

“Only time will tell how much the our immune responses to COVID-19 (natural and/or vaccine-induced) will react to these seasonal coronaviruses – and vice-versa.”

Prof Peter Openshaw, Professor of Experimental Medicine at Imperial College London, and Honorary Physician in the Department of Respiratory Medicine at the St Mary’s Campus of Imperial College NHS Trust:

“The method they use is a novel on based on flow cytometry, and may detect antibody types not seen in other studies. It is very interesting that they have detected coronavirus cross-reactive antibodies in children and adolescents, but it is not yet clear if this explains the relatively mild disease seen in younger people. It’s also not clear why older people don’t have these antibodies. One possibility is that these antibodies have been induced by common cold coronaviruses, but why they differ with age remains to be determined.”

‘Pre-existing and de novo humoral immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in humans’ by Ng et al is published in Science.

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.