August 2020

In a recent case study report in published recently in JCI, authors show a woman with COVID-19 in the second trimester of pregnancy, who had severe hypertension, coagulopathy, and preeclampsia. The authors found that on histological examination, that the placenta had diffuse perivillous fibrin

We highlight a lecture by Yasmine Belkaid on "The control of immunity and allergy by Microbiota." She described how data from skin microbiome sequencing in association with immune signatures...

A non-invasive test for mucosal and systemic antibody responses may be an effective way of population screening for humoral immunity to infection. MedRxiv Pre-print compares IgG and IgA Abs in serum and saliva from acute & convalescent patients.

This webinar, co-hosted by South African Immunology Society (SAIS) and Immunoapedia featured talks by Prof Shabir Madhi on "COVID-19 vaccines being evaluated in South Africa" and Prof Ed Rybicki on "Alternative vaccine approaches for SARS-CoV-2".

Children are less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and if they do become infected, majority of children will have asymptomatic or mild COVID-19. Recent reports have described cases of severe hyperinflammation in children infected with COVID-19...

Investigators from Sweden have reported on SARS-CoV-2-specific memory T cells and long-term immune protection against COVID-19. The authors examined the function and phenotype of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses in a total of 206 people consisting of unexposed individuals, exposed family members, and individuals with acute or convalescent COVID-19.

Allergens are characterized by two important properties; the first being the allergenicity and the second being the allergenic activity. The later represents the capacity of an allergen to induce allergic inflammation, a process that can be dependent or independent of IgE activity. As a result, the IgE binding property of an allergen only evaluates a part of the allergenic activity...

Joyner et al., studied a cohort of 5000 participants, 81% with severe or life-threatening COVID-19% with a high risk of severe progression, who received convalescent plasma therapy. They reported a very low frequency (<1%) of severe adverse events with a 7-day mortality rate of 14.9%. Despite, the study not being designed to determine the efficacy of convalescent plasma therapy...

Yuting Ma presented data from a murine stress model, that demonstrated that stressed mice have a lower capacity to induce viral-specific T cell immunity and lower B cell activation than non-stressed mice. She further demonstrated a stress-induced effect of stress on the gut bacteriome and virome, as well as metabolic dysfunction. Factors that can all contribute to dampened immunity.  

Hoffman et al., demonstrated that (hydroxy)chloroquine inhibited viral entry in Vero (kidney-derived) cell-lines that did not express TMPRSS2, but had no inhibitory effect on Vero cells-lines that expressed TMPRSS2. Additionally, (hydroxy)chloroquine had limited effect on SARS-CoV-2 entry into TMPRSS2-expressing lung cell-lines.