2020

Lisa Ng in a recent IUIS webinar, “provides an overview of the pathophysiology of SARS-CoV-2 infection. She describes its interaction with the immune system and the subsequent contribution of dysfunctional immune responses to disease progression”. Highlights of her webinar include:Identification of two B cell epitopes S14P5 and S21P that induce neutralising Ab in COVID-19 patients...

IUIS webinar by Donna Farber described respiratory immunity associated with COVID-19. Highlights from her talk include: The importance of T cell differentiation and tissue localisation, particularly development of tissue resident memory (TRM) cells, in the maintenance of protective immunity against respiratory viruses. Research by Zhao et al., that demonstrate that airway TRM CD4 T cells play...

Identification of immunogenic SARS-CoV-2 epitopes and peptides are critical to the design of new diagnostics and potential vaccines. Researchers from A*Star and other Singaporean research institutions aimed to identify potential B cell epitopes recognised by Abs from convalescent COVID-19 patients. Using neutralisation assays researchers identified two immunodominant epitopes S14P5 and S21P...

Developing neutralising antibodies that target the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, has been highlighted as a potential strategy for an effective COVID-19 vaccine. Pre-clinical studies have demonstrated the ability to induce high levels of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein-specific neutralising Abs (nAbs) in animal models. However, adenovirus-based vaccines such as the ChAdOx1 and a human adenovirus 5...

Using multiple assays for detecting antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike (S) glycoprotein, a recent pre-peer reviewed paper in bioRxiv shows “pre-existing immunity in uninfected and unexposed humans to the new coronavirus.” The authors were able to detect Spike-reactive IgG in SARS-CoV-2-uninfected individuals with recent other Coronavirus (HCoV) infections using a sensitive flow cytometry...

A recent report in The Lancet cites three case studies showing that cardiovascular complications, in addition to respiratory disease, may be emerging as a “key threat in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)”.  The authors present cases that demonstrate endothelial cell involvement across vascular beds of different organs in COVID-19. They show the “presence of viral elements within endothelial cells and an accumulation of inflammatory cells

A replication defective Ad5 vectored vaccine expressing the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 based on the full-length spike gene from the Wuhan-Hu-1 strain was given to three groups of volunteers at different doses (thirty six volunteers in each). The most common injection site adverse reaction was pain, reported in 58 (54%) vaccine recipients...

With an impending second wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections predicted, one important question is whether a person infected once can develop enough durable protective immunity to prevent re-infection when exposed again. In a recent edition of Science, a rhesus macaque model of SARS-CoV-2 infection was developed, where “high viral loads in the upper and lower respiratory tract, humoral and cellular immune responses...

A recent study in Cell focused on defining the host response to SARS-CoV-2 and other human respiratory viruses in cell lines, primary cell cultures, ferrets, and COVID-19 patients. The authors show a distinct transcriptional footprint exists with SARS-CoV-2 infection when compared with other coronaviruses and common respiratory viruses such as IAV, HPIV3, and RSV. The response to SARS-CoV-2 was defined...

IUIS webinar by Sharon Lewin and Katherine Kedzierska show how immunity to SARS-CoV2 has demonstrated the breadth of concomitant immune responses associated with recovery in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 requiring hospitalisation. Their study indicates that robust multi-factorial immune responses can be elicited towards the newly-emerged SARS-CoV-2 and early adaptive immune responses...