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SARS-CoV-2 escape in vitro from highly neutralizing Covid-19 convalescent plasma (2020)
- gandalfgreybeer 5y ago> One Sentence Summary: Three mutations allowed SARS-CoV-2 to evade the polyclonal antibody response of a highly neutralizing COVID-19 convalescent plasma. What is “the polyclonal antibody response of a highly neutralizing COVID-19 convalescent plasma” in less technical terms?
- XorNot 5y ago"convalescent plasma" is blood plasma from a person who has recovered from a disease and is thus rich in the antibody response they generated to recover from it. It's been used in Ebola outbreaks as a "hail mary" to cure people - it's also one of the more absurdly easy things to do - pretty much just take a blood sample, spin out the platelets and inject the plasma left behind (clinically you can be a lot more careful, but its one of the weirdest effective "primitive" treatments you can do).
- taken_every_ 5y agoConvalescent plasma -> blood plasma from someone who recovered Highly neutralizing -> very effective at murdering COVID virus Polyclonal antibody response -> the person's immune system produced different antibodies to fight COVID which probably attack different parts of the virus
- mschuster91 5y ago> highly neutralizing COVID-19 convalescent plasma Basically, you take the blood plasma of someone recently recovered from COVID-19 with high antibody counts and filter antibodies out of it, that are then administered to critically ill patients. Same procedure is used in manufacturing snake venom antidotes (with horses as host bodies, since they are able to resist snake bites). More about this can be read e.g. here: https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/convalescent-plasma-therapy/about/pac-20486440 https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/convalescent-pla... As for the different type of antibody - tl;dr of https://www.ptglab.com/news/blog/polyclonal-vs-monoclonal-antibodies/ https://www.ptglab.com/news/blog/polyclonal-vs-monoclonal-an... is "monoclonal antibodies are all of the same configuration and target one specific molecule, whereas polyclonal antibodies have a higher amount of variance in matching". As for "what exactly did they do" - they took samples of the specific virus and exposed it to such a blood plasma sample, and noticed escape, aka surviving infectious viruses. Which in turn is bad news as it means that this specific strain of virus at least has the potential capability to evade the body's immune system protection that has been built up by infection or immunization. As this is an "in vitro" test though, this means that it may also be possible that an "in vivo" test (=exposing a live human instead of a blood sample) would fail.
- boomskats 5y agoRelevant discussion on a similar previously posted article (also more recent than this one) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25861769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25861769
- janandonly 5y agoThis is worrisome to me because many people who took the first set of vaccines are now feeling less inclined to take a “booster shot”. This article argues we will not only need a booster but effective a whole new vaccine against this new Corona variant.
- icedchai 5y agoLooks like that paper is a preprint almost a year old. Is there anything new here?
- kybernetyk 5y agoLONG Pfizer et al I guess
- helge9210 5y ago> are now feeling less inclined to take a “booster shot” "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" © Vaccines are perfect at eradicating certain diseases, just not COVID-19.
- EMM_386 5y agoI have a strong feeling that Covid-19 is going to be with us for a long time. The problem with that is with a lot of the vulnerable population. This isn't "the flu".
- yyyk 5y agoCovid is known to be transferrable to animals and back. There's no way to kill it without measures that make the lockdowns look pretty or futuristic tech we don't have (no 'vaccinate everything' won't work, unless someone feels vaccinating every cave bat in safe third-world countries like Afghanistan in a reasonable timeframe is actually possible).
- throwaway55421 5y agoAlso we'd need to vaccinate those bats with something which actually kills off corona rather than just reducing its' effects a bit.
- VoodooJuJu 5y agoIt is worse than the flu, but it isn't that much worse. With vaccines now widely available, people will just have to learn to stop being afraid. Get your annual covid vaccine, bundled with your flu vaccine, and go live your life.
- mdp2021 5y agoVaccines aside, many of us never saw others dying lung-less "after a flu". Vaccines included, some of us were never told that "a flu" could frequently provide long term impairment (this with reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339783 )
- helge9210 5y agoTL;DR If it got to lungs, they (COVID-19, flu) are both worse. Any lung infection will have a lasting effect (in survivors). In lucky cases, pneumonia is caused by bacteria sensitive to antibiotics. If it's viral (flu, SARS/MERS/SARS-Cov-2 or anything else) or antibiotic resistant hospital bactery, that's basically it.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoShit.
- _Microft 5y agoCould someone add „2020/12“? I think as dynamically as everything is evolving, adding the month to the year is worth it for pandemic related submissions.
- School-Cotton 5y agoI agree. dang, if you see this, what do you think?
- sudhirj 5y agoSo in one way this is scary, because it seems like the virus mutates quickly to escape immune systems that know how to find it - so we need new vaccines periodically. But aren’t we already used to this? From what I understand the flu vaccine is constantly updated and with multiple strains combined every single year. There’s a committee that already does this for influenza, it doesnt seem like to big deal to add one for covid?
- podgaj 5y agoI do not mean any offense to you personally with this comment. I think science should be limited to scientists, and this is a good example. I am not a researcher but I know enough to know what I do not know. People saying that this "virus mutates quickly" is not only wrong but makes it scarier than it is. Every virus mutates when it is in a new host. A variant is created when that mutation confers some survival benefit. But COVID actually mutates MUCH SLOWER than influenza!!!! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33064680/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33064680/ "Both viruses depend on a viral RNA polymerase to express their proteins, but only SARS-CoV-2 has a proofreading mechanism, which results in a low mutation rate compared to influenza." https://www.astrazeneca.com/what-science-can-do/topics/disease-understanding/the-natural-evolution-of-sars-cov-2.html https://www.astrazeneca.com/what-science-can-do/topics/disea... "The average mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 remains low and steady, and is much slower than other RNA viruses such as influenza viruses. Unlike coronaviruses, influenza viruses (which cause the flu) are prone to changes through processes called antigenic drift and antigenic shift.3,4" The only thing that makes SARS2 a bigger problem that the flu is the R value, or how fast it spreads. Flu is between R1 and R2, while Delta was between R5 and R7. So the issue is not one of mutations, but of spread. Vaccines do not stop the spread and that is a problem. Even when vaccinates you have no symptoms but you will catch the virus and create mutations. A total worldwide lockdown, IMO, would have stopped this dead because of the low mutation rate. But unfortunately governments favored the economy over lives. And I also blame Fauci and Trump for not making enough N95 masks and Fauci actually discouraging their use in the beginning. At this point it is with us forever since wildlife will continue to spread it. Eventually it will settle to a place where it kills X amount of people and we will be OK with it as we have become OK with the flu killing 30,000 to 70,000 people a year.
- mabbo 5y agoWhen covid-19 first popped up, it seemed the time from sequencing to first trials of vaccinations was in the order of weeks. This mRNA tech is just incredible that way. Is anyone making and testing new vaccines that address the new variants? One would expect the variants just have a few key protein changes, which could be vaccinated against. And more importantly, do we see any hope of accelerated timelines for nearly identical vaccines that target slightly different proteins?
- rsfern 5y agoModerna is starting development on an omicron-specific vaccine, as well as testing their other vaccine variants. I wonder if maybe the manufacturing data required for approval could be expedited in these sort of minor vaccine version updates? https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-strategy-address-omicron-b11529-sars-cov-2 https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
- mdp2021 5y ago> Moderna is starting development on an omicron-specific vaccine Also the Novavax producers. RSS feeds hours ago were full of "ready in 100 days" expressions; as I am making posts-vetting checks on search engines I am seeing one «would have the shot ready for testing and manufacturing in the next few weeks» (https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/novavax-testing-vaccine-that-targets-new-omicron-covid-19-variant https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/novavax-tes...).
- jeremyjh 5y agoDo we know that a "minor version update" could never cause a problem like the 1976 Swine Flu vaccine that was rushed to mass deployment and killed far more people than that flu did?
- rsfern 5y agoRight, there’s not way to know that without the clinical trials that are required even for small formulation changes, our quantitative understanding of biology is not that good. But there’s plenty of supply chain and manufacturing aspects of the approval that seem like wouldn’t need any more stringency than the ongoing monitoring for the currently approved vaccines, from my lay persons perspective anyway
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- actually_a_dog 5y agoThe thing about Omicron is that it has a very large number of really bad mutations: > The variant has a large number of mutations, of which some are concerning.[8] 32 mutations affect the spike protein, the main antigenic target of antibodies generated by infections and of many vaccines widely administered. Many of those mutations had not been observed in other strains.[9][10] > The variant is characterised by 30 amino acid changes, three small deletions and one small insertion in the spike protein compared with the original virus, of which 15 are located in the receptor binding domain (residues 319-541). It also carries a number of changes and deletions in other genomic regions. Of note, the variant has three mutations at the furin cleavage site.[11] The furin cleavage site increases SARS-CoV-2 infectivity.[12] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Omicron_variant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Omicron_variant The "receptor binding domain" is the portion of the spike protein that actually binds to the ACE2 receptor the virus uses to get into our cells. In contrast, Delta has 3 mutations in the RBD (https://asm.org/Articles/2021/July/How-Dangerous-is-the-Delta-Variant-B-1-617-2 https://asm.org/Articles/2021/July/How-Dangerous-is-the-Delt...) and it has 10 mutations affecting the spike protein (https://gvn.org/covid-19/delta-b-1-617-2/ https://gvn.org/covid-19/delta-b-1-617-2/)
- gojomo 5y agoI'd be curious to know where this research was performed. They expected 'co-incubation' might produce a variant that escapes prior immunity, as represented by convalescent plasma containing antibodies. They performed this co-incubation for "more than 90 days". They confirmed what they were looking for – what they were essentially trying to create: a virus with a novel collection of mutations that escaped immunity. It was thus plausibly gain-of-function research, aka "Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogen research", on a virus whose danger level was far beyond "Potential Pandemic Pathogen". This research enhanced an actual pandemic pathogen. Did it pass gain-of-function review? How secure was the lab it occurred in? Note that some theorize the Omicron variant, now causing panic & fresh travel bans around the world, originated from a long-lived infection in an immunocompromised patient – where it had time, like in this experiment, to incrementally add many mutations over many generations. Omicron was perhaps even under the selective pressure of a similar external-antibodies treatment.
- hjtkfkfmr 5y agoOne thing that we learned in this pandemic is that most scientists are not that different from most politicians or CEOs - they are sociopaths. All they care about is grant money, and they will do whatever it takes to keep it coming. Including lying and diverting attention from the dangers of virology, or covering their colleagues mishaps, including the triggering of a pandemic.
- incrudible 5y agoCan someone elaborate whether this paper predicted one of the mutations in Omicron, precisely? Or is it just an experiment that shows what some variant might do to escape immunity, not this particular new one?