Finalists
German scientists have isolated 28 antibodies that neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus
Maria Azarova, Naked Science
The formation of neutralizing antibodies – large globular plasma proteins that produce plasma cells of our immune system – serve as an important line of defense in the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The bottom line is that they allow to prevent the pathogen from entering healthy cells and have great potential for the prevention and treatment of Covid-19 disease.
Many scientists are working on the search for antibodies and their study, some discoveries have already been reported earlier. Now, a team of researchers led by Professor Florian Klein (Cologne University Hospital) and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have discovered 28 powerful neutralizing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, which can be active for several weeks, and found out the mechanism of their formation. The results of the work appeared the day before yesterday in the journal Cell (Kreer et al., Longitudinal isolation of potential near-germline SARS-CoV-2-neutralizing antibodies from COVID-19 patients), but research continues. Clinical trials are expected to begin by the end of this year.
The purpose of the work, notes Klein, it was necessary to understand how the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 occurs, and to identify potent antibodies that could be used for the prevention and treatment of coronavirus disease, which has already claimed the lives of 550 thousand people worldwide.
A team of scientists from Marburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Tubingen and Israel searched for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in 12 people who managed to defeat the coronavirus infection. They studied over four thousand SARS-CoV-2-specific B cells at the level of individual molecules and were able to partially decode the humoral immune response (occurs by the production of Ig immunoglobulins to a foreign antigen) to the coronavirus. As a result, the researchers reconstructed 255 antibodies, which were then tested in the laboratory of Professor Stefan Becker in Marburg for the ability to neutralize SARS-CoV-2. 28 of them reached the final.
"The peculiarity of the neutralizing antibodies we found is that many of them showed a small number of mutations. Consequently, they needed to adapt a little bit in order to effectively recognize and neutralize the virus," explains Dr. Matthias Zechner. By studying blood samples collected before the coronavirus pandemic began, scientists realized that B-lymphocytes (a functional type of lymphocytes that play an important role in providing humoral immunity) have the characteristics of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. According to the researchers, this suggests that these globular proteins can be rapidly formed by the immune system, for example, as a result of active immunization. And this, in turn, gives hope that the vaccine will help provide rapid protection against infection.
In addition to preventing infection and directly treating patients with Covid-19, antibodies can be used for prevention after contact with an infected person. "This form of intervention is of particular interest for stopping local outbreaks and preventing the progression of the disease in people at risk," Klein summed up.
Note that a recent study conducted on the material of Chinese Wuhan showed that most often people who have suffered from coronavirus disease do not show a noticeable level of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.
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