Coronavirus Antibodies Were Found To Be Capable Of Blocking Multiple Strains Of The Virus

Mar, 2023 - By WMR

Particularly in persons who've already healed from the SARS-CoV-2 virus and were subsequently immunized, researchers have discovered antibodies in the blood of some Covid-19 donors that can prevent infection from a wide range of coronaviruses.

With blood samples from human participants, the researchers conducted a more thorough search for anti-S2 antibodies. These volunteers were people who had either overcome Covid-19, received a vaccination, or had overcome Covid-19 and later received a vaccination.

In the later group of volunteers—those who'd already been cured of Covid-19 and then received the vaccine—antibodies to the susceptible S2 location were discovered in the overwhelming bulk of volunteers, but at a substantially lower incidence in the others. The researchers found and studied 32 of these S2-targeting antibodies in all.

Researchers discovered that several of these antibodies offer protection of remarkable scope — not merely against SARS-CoV-2 but also against SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV beta coronaviruses — in investigations of virus neutralization in the lab and studies using mice exposed to viruses.

A fundamental obstacle to the creation of vaccines and antibody treatments against these viruses is their rather high rate of mutation.

Although the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been greatly reduced by the use of existing vaccines, new SARS-CoV-2 variants have appeared that can spread even among those who have received the vaccine.

However, over the past two years, the research has discovered proof that SARS-CoV-2 and other betacoronaviruses have a susceptible location that is not subject to frequent mutation. In betacoronaviruses that infect a wide range of animal species, this location, which is in the S2 region (or base) of the viral spike protein, is comparatively conserved.

In theory, a vaccination technique that can produce these antibodies is expected to offer a comprehensive defense against a variety of betacoronaviruses.

Future vaccines targeting this area should benefit from the critical knowledge provided by structural analyses of several of the antibodies bound to S2, which highlighted their shared binding affinity and ways of binding.

This molecular data on the associations of these antigens with the S2 domain could be used by targeted rational vaccination techniques to guide the development of a pan-betacoronavirus vaccine.