SARS-CoV-2 variants B.1.351 and P.1 escape from neutralizing antibodies

By M. Hoffmann, P. Arora, R. Gross, Alina Seidel, Bojan F. Hörnich, Alexander S. Hahn, Nadine Krüger, Luise Graichen, Heike Hofmann-Winkler, A. Kempf and 9 more. Cell, 2021

864 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The global spread of SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 is devastating health systems and economies worldwide. Recombinant or vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies are used to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the recently emerged SARS-CoV-2 variants B.1.1.7 (UK), B.1.351 (South Africa), and P.1 (Brazil) harbor mutations in the viral spike (S) protein that may alter virus-host cell interactions and confer resistance to inhibitors and antibodies. Here, using pseudoparticles, we show that entry of all variants into human cells is susceptible to blockade by the entry inhibitors soluble ACE2, Camostat, EK-1, and EK-1-C4. In contrast, entry of the B.1.351 and P.1 variant was partially (Casirivimab) or fully (Bamlanivimab) resistant to antibodies used for COVID-19 treatment. Moreover, entry of these variants was less efficiently inhibited by plasma from convalescent COVID-19 patients and sera from BNT162b2-vaccinated individuals. These results suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may escape neutralizing antibody responses, which has important implications for efforts to contain the pandemic.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbefd190be9b5a82addc90e2ed24b83b96de8b4a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

K. Gangavarapu
M. Cano
Emily L Haag
L. Hughes
J. Mullen
S. Maurer‐Stroh
Andrew Su
Rachel A. Sattler

Citations in the corpus

Outbreak.info genomic reports: scalable and dynamic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 variants and mutations (2023, positive): “Both Beta and Gamma variants show varying degrees of immune evasion [39].”
The Omicron variant is highly resistant against antibody-mediated neutralization: Implications for control of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, neutral): “Analysis of ACE2 binding The production of soluble ACE2 fused to the Fc portion of human immunoglobuline has been previously described in detail (Hoffmann et al., 2021b).”