A Single Antibody Neutralizes All COVID19 Variants – A New Study out of Washington U. in St. Louis
The best COVID news I have heard recently has come out of Washington University in St. Louis and is soon to be published in the journal Immunity. The way science works is that others need to verify the accuracy of the study’s findings by going through the original data to confirm that they got it right in the first place. If they did get it right then others will conduct their own studies to attempt to repeat the findings of the original study. If the information is shown to be scientifically accurate the results would work up the scientific/therapeutic food chain and one day maybe, just maybe, a usable therapeutic may be developed to be used by you and me. Sounds slow, huh? Usually is. But the turbo charger that COVID19 is got us 2 vaccines within 11 months of the sequencing of the original SARS-Cov-2 viral genome back in January of 2020. Today though, we all know that those vaccines have reduced efficacy against the new and improved Delta variant. Why? Remember, the way the vaccines work is to place a little strand of mRNA into your cells to force them to make a part of the virus’s spike protein (the one that attaches to your cells and infects them). This self-created antigen goes into your blood where your own immune system creates antibodies and lots of other goodies establishing immunity. As it turns out it appears that Pfizer and Moderna could have chosen a better part of the spike protein, but who knew?
The part of the spike protein that us vaxxed folks have antibodies for is changing just a little bit each time the virus mutates, a thing that will happen anytime there is ample room for transmission in a group of people. That’s just how viruses work. As the spike changes our antibodies become less and less effective until one day the spike changes so much our shots become more or less useless. The answer to this up to this point has been to analyze the new variants and change the vaccine accordingly. Pfizer and Moderna say they can do this in less than 100 days. That’s great but you might see where this could end up. We keep analyzing and creating new vaccines every 100 days while COVID bobs and weaves to avoid our new and improved antibodies. This could get more tedious than the past 1-1/2+ years have already been. But what if there was a part of the spike protein that didn’t change as the virus mutates, one that we could make a single antibody for that would work for all current and (hopefully) future variants. Well, that’s exactly the news coming out of Washington University in St. Louis.
Researchers there have isolated a single antibody cleverly named SARS2-38 that has been able to, at low concentrations, “easily” neutralize all known variants of interest in the petri dish. Also, this same antibody when injected into mice prevented infection from the kappa and beta variants, the latter of which is known to be very resistant to antibodies. Looking deeper they were able to identify the precise spot on the spike protein that the antibodies were targeting. They found 2 mutations at that site that could theoretically prevent the antibodies from working, but real world testing shows that these 2 mutations are “vanishingly” rare. In the WHO database of nearly 800,000 SARS-Cov-2 sequences they found this mutation in a mere 0.04% of them. Way cool. So what does this all mean to you and me?
It means that researchers will likely jump all over this study, verify its results and conclusions, duplicate it, check the results against other variants in mice, and if it all looks good then work on developing new therapeutics in the form of both treatments and vaccinations. Perhaps they might be able import the mRNA strand coding for this portion of the spike protein into the existing Pfizer and Moderna delivery platforms and begin human trials. Might this lead to the final COVID19 vaccine? Way too early for that type of wishful thinking. I have heard the term “game changer” so many times I’m numb to it, but could this be a game changer, or just another red herring? Time will tell. But this is at least very good news at a time when we could use just a bit.
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