Evolution of Antibody Immunity to SARS-CoV-2
By C. Gaebler, Zijun Wang, Julio C. C. Lorenzi, Frauke Muecksch, Shlomo Finkin, M. Tokuyama, A. Cho, M. Jankovic, Dennis J. Schaefer-Babajew, Thiago Y. Oliveira and 32 more. bioRxiv, 2020
805 citations recorded by the source corpus.
SARS-CoV-2 has infected 47 million individuals and is responsible for over 1.2 million deaths to date. Infection is associated with development of variable levels of antibodies with neutralizing activity that can protect against infection in animal models. Antibody levels decrease with time, but the nature and quality of the memory B cells that would be called upon to produce antibodies upon re-infection has not been examined. Here we report on the humoral memory response in a cohort of 87 individuals assessed at 1.3 and 6.2 months after infection. We find that IgM, and IgG anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD) antibody titers decrease significantly with IgA being less affected. Concurrently, neutralizing activity in plasma decreases by five-fold in pseudotype virus assays. In contrast, the number of RBD-specific memory B cells is unchanged. Memory B cells display clonal turnover after 6.2 months, and the antibodies they express have greater somatic hypermutation, increased potency and resistance to RBD mutations, indicative of continued evolution of the humoral response. Analysis of intestinal biopsies obtained from asymptomatic individuals 3 months after COVID-19 onset, using immunofluorescence, electron tomography or polymerase chain reaction, revealed persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in the small bowel of 7 out of 14 volunteers. We conclude that the memory B cell response to SARS-CoV-2 evolves between 1.3 and 6.2 months after infection in a manner that is consistent with antigen persistence.
Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Neurology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/891bd873d8aaf363edaa0e87d0ab7b8f2aa51057
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Citations in the corpus
- Characterizing long COVID in an international cohort: 7 months of symptoms and their impact (2020, background): “Regarding antibody testing, it has been reported that antibody levels decrease with time [44,45], that males are likely to retain antibodies longer than females [46], and that antibody tests can be less accurate for females [47].”
- A human coronavirus evolves antigenically to escape antibody immunity (2020, background): “This possibility now seems less likely, as SARS-CoV-2 infection induces neutralizing antibodies and memory B cells with dynamics similar to other respiratory viruses (Crawford et al., 2020a; Gaebler et al., 2020; Rodda et al., 2020; Wajnberg et al., 2020).”
- Adaptive immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 (2021, positive): “Notably, frequencies of RBD (and Spike) memory B cells increased over time, with more RBDmemory B cells at 6 months PSO than at 1 month PSO (Dan et al., 2021; Gaebler et al., 2020), consistent with observations at 3 months PSO (Rodda et al., 2021).”
- Comprehensive mapping of mutations to the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain that affect recognition by polyclonal human serum antibodies (2021, background): “We speculated that such changes might occur because other studies have shown that anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies become more somatically hypermutated and less clonal in the months following recovery from infection (Gaebler et al., 2020; Nielsen et al., 2020; Rodda et al., 2020).”
- Immunological memory to SARS-CoV-2 assessed for up to 8 months after infection (2021, result): “Other studies of RBD memory B cells report similar findings (50, 60).”