mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine boosters induce neutralizing immunity against SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant
By W. Garcia-Beltran, Kerri J. St. Denis, Angelique Hoelzemer, Evan C. Lam, Adam D Nitido, M. Sheehan, C. Berríos, Onosereme Ofoman, Christina C. Chang, B. Hauser and 8 more. medRxiv, 2021
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Recent surveillance has revealed the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1/B.1.1.529) harboring up to 36 mutations in spike protein, the target of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies. Given its potential to escape vaccine-induced humoral immunity, we measured neutralization potency of sera from 88 mRNA-1273, 111 BNT162b, and 40 Ad26.COV2.S vaccine recipients against wild type, Delta, and Omicron SARS-CoV-2 pseudoviruses. We included individuals that were vaccinated recently (<3 months), distantly (6-12 months), or recently boosted, and accounted for prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. Remarkably, neutralization of Omicron was undetectable in most vaccinated individuals. However, individuals boosted with mRNA vaccines exhibited potent neutralization of Omicron only 4-6-fold lower than wild type, suggesting that boosters enhance the cross-reactivity of neutralizing antibody responses. In addition, we find Omicron pseudovirus is significantly more infectious than any other variant tested. Overall, this study highlights the importance of boosters to broaden neutralizing antibody responses against highly divergent SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Subfields: Animal Science and Zoology, Infectious Diseases
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9410571cb7af9dd15539ab83125e96984bce3c8
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Citations in the corpus
- SARS-CoV-2 vaccination induces immunological T cell memory able to cross-recognize variants from Alpha to Omicron (2022, neutral): “While the impact of variant-associated mutations has been established for most variants in terms of antibody reactivity (Garcia-Beltran et al., 2021; Stamatatos et al., 2021), including studies on Omicron (Liu et al.”
- Omicron extensively but incompletely escapes Pfizer BNT162b2 neutralization (2021, positive): “Notably, the Pfizer–BioNTech study reports that boosting seems to increase neutralization breadth, which reduces the escape by Omicron relative to ancestral virus; these results have been validated independently 21 .”