Correlates of Protection Against SARS-CoV-2 in Rhesus Macaques

By K. McMahan, Jingyou Yu, N. Mercado, C. Loos, Lisa H. Tostanoski, A. Chandrashekar, Jinyan Liu, Lauren Peter, C. Atyeo, A. Zhu and 20 more. Nature, 2020

1,065 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent studies have reported the protective efficacy of both natural1 and vaccine-induced2–7 immunity against challenge with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in rhesus macaques. However, the importance of humoral and cellular immunity for protection against infection with SARS-CoV-2 remains to be determined. Here we show that the adoptive transfer of purified IgG from convalescent rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) protects naive recipient macaques against challenge with SARS-CoV-2 in a dose-dependent fashion. Depletion of CD8+ T cells in convalescent macaques partially abrogated the protective efficacy of natural immunity against rechallenge with SARS-CoV-2, which suggests a role for cellular immunity in the context of waning or subprotective antibody titres. These data demonstrate that relatively low antibody titres are sufficient for protection against SARS-CoV-2 in rhesus macaques, and that cellular immune responses may contribute to protection if antibody responses are suboptimal. We also show that higher antibody titres are required for treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection in macaques. These findings have implications for the development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and immune-based therapeutic agents. Adoptive transfer of purified IgG from convalescent macaques protects naive macaques against SARS-CoV-2 infection, and cellular immune responses contribute to protection against rechallenge with SARS-CoV-2.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26c6be5957739a92a9ea07f54c1f2754bf17f9a4

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In Infectious Diseases

1. Alessandro Sette
2. Shane Crotty
3. Jesse D. Bloom

Citations in the corpus

• Evidence for antibody as a protective correlate for COVID-19 vaccines (2021, positive): “Meanwhile, a mounting body of evidence from non-human primate [3] and natural history [4] studies suggests that an antibody-based correlate of protection can be estimated for COVID-19 vaccines.”
• A human coronavirus evolves antigenically to escape antibody immunity (2020, methodology): “The tree is a maximum-likelihood inference with IQ-TREE (Minh et al., 2020) with a codon-substitution model and re-scaled with TreeTime (Sagulenko et al., 2018) to position tips by to date of isolation.”
• Adaptive immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 (2021, positive): “SARS-CoV-2 URT infection is important for transmission and is associated with milder disease symptoms.”
• Recurrent deletions in the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein drive antibody escape (2021, background): “Humoral 39 immunity to S glycoprotein appears to be the strongest correlate of protection (9) and recently approved 40 vaccines deliver this antigen by immunization.”
• mRNA Vaccines in the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond. (2021, background): “examined the protection conferred to rhesus macaques by antibodies by performing an adoptive transfer of IgG from SARS-CoV2 convalescent monkeys to naïve monkeys (49).”