5 ms·
> [T]his paper shows that these patients still have (17 years later!) a robust T-cell response to the original SARS coronavirus’s N protein, which extends an ea
by est31 6y ago
> [T]his paper shows that these patients still have (17 years later!) a robust T-cell response to the original SARS coronavirus’s N protein, which extends an earlier report of such responses going out to 11 years. This new work finds that these cross-react with the new SARS CoV-2 N protein as well. This makes one think, as many have been wondering, that T-cell driven immunity is perhaps the way to reconcile the apparent paradox between (1) antibody responses that seem to be dropping week by week in convalescent patients but (2) few (if any) reliable reports of actual re-infection. That would be good news indeed.
- mycall 6y agoCould a lab theoretically take your T-cells and "upgrade" them with all kinds of immunity robustness against say 100 viruses?
- lactobacillis 6y agoThat is what vaccines do as I understand it.
- frisco 6y agoTotally. This is called "adoptive cell transfer" and it's one of the hottest areas of biotech at the moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoptive_cell_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoptive_cell_transfer
- ineedasername 6y agoWow, sure it's not at "super human" immune system levels yet, but this is the type of research that feels like we're entering SciFi territory.
- _jahh 6y agoyou type into your glowing device connected nigh-instantaneously to a hefty proportion of the world.
- smsx 6y agoyes, but i’m used to that already :)
- vkou 6y agoSo, like an 1840s telegraph, but a bit better and with more spyware?
- adrianN 6y agoThis cell transfer thing is just like a vaccination, but better. And a 2020 car is just like an 1820 train, but better. And a computer is just a programmable loom, but better.
- 3pt14159 6y agoHaha, I was with you until the computer comparison. A 2020 car can go an order of magnitude faster than a 1820 train. A 2020 computer can go so much faster I can't even estimate how many orders of magnitude with certainty.
- ineedasername 6y agoYep, and I remember when I got my first kindle e-ink reader, the first one they made, and was in awe because between that and the first iphone a few months earlier, it reminded me so much of the device described in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. I got used to it, and the feeling went away. I had a similar feeling when I got a bluetooth headset where I just had to tap and speak and Google would answer almost any question I had, no need to even half shout "OKAY GOOGLE" for my phone to hear. I now actually feel dumber without such a headset because I can't easily get answers to random questions. So, yeah, we get used to these things. The measure of "being in the future" is less the awe we have at technological marvels and more the way they become common place and accepted.
- etrautmann 6y agowouldn't a normal vaccine classify as "super human" immune performance? I take your point, but what's sci-fi is always a receding horizon :)
- mromanuk 6y agoAlways wonder about the data density of this type of information: it’s possible to Store all the virus? It’s LIFO stack? What’s the limit?
- ztjio 6y agoIn tech terms? It's probably more like a bloom filter, which means eventually it can be a problem if it starts to get too many false positives.
- blueblisters 6y agoFalse positives as in it starts attacking healthy/friendly cells? That seems like a pretty big downside.
- beagle3 6y agoIt is a huge problem. It’s called “autoimmune disease”, and global prevalence is on the rise. AFAIK the hypothesis is that is a result of modern life being “too clean”, so not enough “unfriendly” variety to train on.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoHappens 1 in 100k people every year. It's called Guillain-Barré syndrome [1]. After an infection your immune system gets confused and starts attacking your peripheral nerves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillain–Barré_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillain–Barré_syndrome
- shawnz 6y agoThat's just one of many possible autoimmune diseases.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoYes, of course there are tons of autoimmune diseases (from mild allergies, to lupus, multiple sclerosis, and sympathetic ophthalmia), but Guillain-Barré syndrome is an autoimmune disease that's known to occur after otherwise banal infections or even vaccine shots. That's why I considered it more relevant to the OP than other autoimmune diseases.
- raducu 6y agoI'm not familiar with what T cells do, I thought they did not have a single target, unlike antibodies -- wouldn't transplanting T cells mean they would immediately attack the patients cells, as they are detected as foreign?
- twic 6y agoT cells have a single target, like antibodies. The target is a peptide, a fragment of a protein 8-11 residues long. That peptide could show up in several target proteins, but usually (?) is unique to one protein. This is a bit of an oversimplification. Firstly, the peptide is 8-11 residues for cytotoxic, aka killer, T cells which i think is what we're talking about here. It's 13-17 residues for for helper T cells. Secondly, there are varieties of T cells which don't have a single target, like invariant natural killer T cells, but those are pretty obscure, and not what people are talking about when they just say "T cells".
- jmrko 6y agoI don't think it is clear at this point that there are unexpected antibody titer drops in comparison to other viruses, Florian Krammer's work looks solid to me: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1285618977654407169.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1285618977654407169.html and original preprint: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.14.20151126v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.14.20151126v...
- baxtr 6y agoIt’s at least not perfectly clear yet. I know some people who tested PCR positive and had negative AB test outcomes. Kramer writes in his pre-print that you’ve linked: >Of note, our observations are in contrast to a recent report by Long et al. that found waning titers 8 weeks post 138 virus infection as compared to acute responses (19). Especially in asymptomatic cases, antibody 139 responses disappeared after 8 weeks in 40% of individuals in the Long et al. study. However, the 140 antibodies measured in their paper were targeting the NP plus a single linear spike epitope. Much 141 more in agreement with our data, the same paper also reports relatively stable (slightly declining) 142 neutralizing antibody titers. The stability of the antibody response over time might therefore also 143 depend on the target antigen. The titers we measure here do correlate with neutralization as 144 discussed above.