COVID-19 mRNA vaccine induced antibody responses against three SARS-CoV-2 variants
Open Access
- 28 June 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Communications
- Vol. 12 (1), 1-11
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24285-4
Abstract
As SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating for over a year, dozens of vaccine candidates are under development or in clinical use. The BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine induces spike protein-specific neutralizing antibodies associated with protective immunity. The emergence of the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants has raised concerns of reduced vaccine efficacy and increased re-infection rates. Here we show, that after the second dose, the sera of BNT162b2-vaccinated health care workers (n = 180) effectively neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 variant with the D614G substitution and the B.1.1.7 variant, whereas the neutralization of the B.1.351 variant is five-fold reduced. Despite the reduction, 92% of the seronegative vaccinees have a neutralization titre of >20 for the B.1.351 variant indicating some protection. The vaccinees’ neutralization titres exceeded those of recovered non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Our work provides evidence that the second dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine induces cross-neutralization of at least some of the circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants.Keywords
This publication has 49 references indexed in Scilit:
- Magnitude and Kinetics of Anti-Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Antibody Responses and Their Relationship to Disease SeverityClinical Infectious Diseases, 2021
- Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2−Specific Antibody Responses in Coronavirus Disease PatientsEmerging Infectious Diseases, 2020
- A serological assay to detect SARS-CoV-2 seroconversion in humansNature Medicine, 2020
- An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real timeThe Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2020
- Multiplex PCR method for MinION and Illumina sequencing of Zika and other virus genomes directly from clinical samplesNature Protocols, 2017
- Trimmomatic: a flexible trimmer for Illumina sequence dataBioinformatics, 2014
- Vaccination in the elderly: an immunological perspectiveTrends in Immunology, 2009
- The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtoolsBioinformatics, 2009
- PAnnBuilder: an R package for assembling proteomic annotation dataBioinformatics, 2009