Detection of SARS-CoV-2-Specific Humoral and Cellular Immunity in COVID-19 Convalescent Individuals

By L. Ni, Fang Ye, Mengli Cheng, Yu Feng, Yongqiang Deng, Hui Zhao, P. Wei, J. Ge, Mengting Gou, Xiaoli Li and 11 more. Immunity, 2020

1,025 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The World Health Organization has declared SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak a worldwide pandemic. However, there is very limited understanding on the immune responses, especially adaptive immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Here, we collected blood from COVID-19 patients who have recently become virus-free, and therefore were discharged, and detected SARS-CoV-2-specific humoral and cellular immunity in eight newly discharged patients. Follow-up analysis on another cohort of six patients 2 weeks post discharge also revealed high titers of immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies. In all 14 patients tested, 13 displayed serum-neutralizing activities in a pseudotype entry assay. Notably, there was a strong correlation between neutralization antibody titers and the numbers of virus-specific T cells. Our work provides a basis for further analysis of protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2, and understanding the pathogenesis of COVID-19, especially in the severe cases. It also has implications in developing an effective vaccine to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a0d2bb9edc800ea87b5f9ce4969bf9e59aaff5e

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Citations in the corpus

Immunology of COVID-19: Current State of the Science (2020, positive): “Continued Biomarker Purpose Immunological CD4+, CD8+, and NK cell counts Lower CD4+, CD8+, and NK cells in PBMCs correlated with severity of COVID-19 (Nie et al., 2020b).”
Broad and strong memory CD4+ and CD8+ T cells induced by SARS-CoV-2 in UK convalescent individuals following COVID-19 (2020, background): “To date, there have been few studies analyzing SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses and their role in disease progression[15], although virus-specific T cells have been shown to be protective in human influenza infection[16].”
COVID-19 and the human innate immune system (2021, background): “In early studies on patients during convalescence, an increased frequency of NK cells was reported (Ni et al., 2020; Rodriguez et al., 2020).”
COVID-19: immunopathogenesis and Immunotherapeutics (2020, background): “Lymphocyte activation and dysfunction T cell activation was investigated in some COVID-19 cases.(28) In one study with 128 convalescent samples, the CD8 T cell response occurred more frequently than the CD4 T cell response.”
A Thermostable mRNA Vaccine against COVID-19 (2020, positive): “A single immunization with ARCoVmRNA-LNP (2 and 30 mg) induced production of SARS-CoV-2 RBD-specific IgG antibodies (Figure S5A) and neutralizing antibodies with 50% neutralization titer (NT50) approached 1/278 and 1/559 28 days after immunization (Figure S5B), which was lower than the neutralizing ”
Deep immune profiling of COVID-19 patients reveals distinct immunotypes with therapeutic implications (2020, background): “Given the potential role of antibodies in the response to SARS-CoV-2 (27, 29), we also analyzed circulating T follicular helper (TFH) cells [CD45RA PD-1CXCR5 (cTFH) (36)] and activated circulating TFH cells [CD38 + ICOS (activated cTFH)], the latter of which may be more reflective of recent antigen ”
Severe COVID-19 Is Marked by a Dysregulated Myeloid Cell Compartment (2020, neutral): “, 2020) and the production of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies (Long et al., 2020; Ni et al., 2020; Robbiani et al., 2020).”
COVID-19 immune features revealed by a large-scale single-cell transcriptome atlas (2021, positive): “This observation is consistent with the previous finding that serum of severe COVID-19 patients had high titers of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies (Ni et al., 2020).”