SARS-CoV-2 Omicron-B.1.1.529 leads to widespread escape from neutralizing antibody responses

By W. Dejnirattisai, J. Huo, Daming Zhou, J. Zahradník, P. Supasa, Chang Liu, Helen M. E. Duyvesteyn, H. Ginn, A. Mentzer, A. Tuekprakhon and 59 more. Cell, 2022

849 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary On 24th November 2021, the sequence of a new SARS-CoV-2 viral isolate Omicron-B.1.1.529 was announced, containing far more mutations in Spike (S) than previously reported variants. Neutralization titers of Omicron by sera from vaccinees and convalescent subjects infected with early pandemic Alpha, Beta, Gamma, or Delta are substantially reduced, or the sera failed to neutralize. Titers against Omicron are boosted by third vaccine doses and are high in both vaccinated individuals and those infected by Delta. Mutations in Omicron knock out or substantially reduce neutralization by most of the large panel of potent monoclonal antibodies and antibodies under commercial development. Omicron S has structural changes from earlier viruses and uses mutations that confer tight binding to ACE2 to unleash evolution driven by immune escape. This leads to a large number of mutations in the ACE2 binding site and rebalances receptor affinity to that of earlier pandemic viruses.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37d6601698757009e3a9927b53075042d2487a82

Citations in the corpus

• Antibody escape of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 from vaccine and BA.1 serum (2022, neutral): “…(https://www.cdc. gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/variant-classifications.html) and have led to successive waves of infection: first, Alpha (Supasa et al., 2021), second, Delta (Liu et al., 2021a), and then Omicron (Dejnirattisai et al., 2022) spread globally, becoming the dominant variants.”