• A Singapore-based emerging disease specialist, Wang Linfa, and his team launched research on eight people that were infected almost two decades ago and recently inoculated two shots of RNA COVID-19 vaccine.
While people fear that new Covid-19 variants might evade existing vaccines and keep causing more infections worldwide, a recent study shows it might be possible to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine and eventually forestall coronavirus outbreaks in the future.
A Singapore-based emerging disease specialist, Wang Linfa, and his team launched a research on eight people that were infected almost two decades ago and recently inoculated two shots of RNA COVID-19 vaccine.
They detected antibodies from their blood that potently “neutralized” an early strain of SARS-CoV-2 as well as SARS-CoV, the virus that caused SARS.
In addition, the team found these neutralizing antibodies worked well against the Alpha, Beta, and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2 and stymied five related coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins that potentially could infect humans.
This suggests people who survived SARS appear to generate a type of super-immunity that fight off multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants, as well as related coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins after being vaccinated against COVID-19, based on the team’s study published on The New England Journal of Medicine on August 18th.
It is reported that SARS-CoV is a strain of Sarbecovirus, a member of the genus Betacoronavirus and subgenus Sarbecoronavirus. SARS-related coronavirus and coronaviruses that have been identified in bats and pangolins also belong to Sarbecovirus.
This Sarbecovirus enters its host cell by binding its spike protein to the human cellular receptor known as angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and such virus in several mammals could potentially infect humans.
In contrast, the blood samples from the fully vaccinated COVID-19 survivors show no such potent and wide-ranging antibody response. The researchers suggest that such broad protection arising might be because the vaccine triggers the immune system’s ‘memory’ of regions of the SARS virus that are also present in SARS-CoV-2, and possibly many other sarbecoviruses.
However, how long this immune response can retain remains unclear and they are yet to identify exactly which sections of the viruses induce the broad immune response, which is critical to designing vaccines.
Wang says he is already working on potential vaccines that target multiple sarbecoviruses, and he now hopes to find additional survivors of the 2002–04 SARS outbreak to conduct a much larger study, including testing their responses to other COVID-19 vaccines.
Credit to Source: One TubeDaily
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