Persistence of humoral and cellular immune response after SARS-CoV-2 infection: opportunities and challenges
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Persistence of humoral and cellular immune response after SARS-CoV-2 infection: opportunities and challenges Tangchun Wu (
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School of Public Health, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430030, China
© Higher Education Press 2020
The emerging COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARSCoV-2 infection has created a global crisis. Under the circumference of no effective treatment or vaccine, the Chinese government has implemented multifaceted measures of social distancing, home isolation, and centralized quarantine, which achieved a remarkable result of controlling the COVID-19 outbreak [1]. However, the personal, psychological, economic, and societal consequences of the shutdown and physical distancing make it difficult to sustain these public health interventions for a long time [2]. To find a new balance between curbing the pandemic and minimizing the indirect effects on society, a better understanding of adaptive immunity in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection is required. Monitoring B cell and T cell immunological memory activated by SARS-CoV-2 over a prolonged period is essential in anticipating durable protection after infection and in developing vaccines. If maintained at sufficiently high levels, the immune response could effectively block re-infection, which might confer long-lived protection [3,4]. Even though, the case report of re-infection with completely different SARS-CoV-2 strains from the first episode [5] raised widespread public concern for the “immune passport” and virus mutation. Despite the urgent need to answer these crucial scientific questions, limited studies have systemically evaluated the long-term humoral and cellular immunity. Therefore, the study by Tan et al. [6] has great importance in filling the knowledge gap (Table 1 provides summaries of studies on the dynamics of antibody response after SARS-CoV-2 infection). The study reported that the IgG antibody of 17 COVID-19 patients were detectable at 6-7 months after diagnosis, although the concentrations were slightly lower compared to results in
Received October 5, 2020; accepted October 5, 2020 Correspondence: Tangchun Wu, [email protected]
the early 2 weeks to 2 months. This is the longest observation of antibody dynamics to our best of knowledge so far. Another novel observation from this study was that 14 samples showed durable neutralizing activities in a pseudovirus assay, with no difference in blocking the cellentry of the 614D and 614G variants of SARS-CoV-2 [6]. Moreover, the study [6] provided compelling evidence that both interferon g-producing CD4+ and CD8+ T cells were increased in response to SARS-CoV-2 antigen stimulation as compared with non-stimulated samples at 6-7 months post-infection. Taken together, this study has provided the most updated evidence for the persistence of humoral and cellular immunity over a relatively longer period, and susceptibility to second infection for mutant coronavirus among convalescent patients. As the level of neutralizing antibodies against the
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