^"Large antibody study offers hope for virus vaccine efforts
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE
Antibodies that people make to fight the new coronavirus last for at least four months after diagnosis and do not fade quickly as some earlier reports suggested, scientists have found.
Tuesday’s report, from tests on more than 30,000 people in Iceland, is the most extensive work yet on the immune system’s response to the virus over time, and is good news for efforts to develop vaccines.
If a vaccine can spur production of long-lasting antibodies as natural infection seems to do, it gives hope that “immunity to this unpredictable and highly contagious virus may not be fleeting,” scientists from Harvard University and the U.S. National Institutes of Health wrote in a commentary published with the study in the New England Journal of Medicine."^
Full article:
apnews.com/bc8888eb4e70c1dd77566e536404afe5?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter
Study:
www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2026116?query=featured_home
Extract from commentary:
"This study focused on a homogeneous population largely from a single ethnic origin and geographic region. Thus, future extended longitudinal studies will be necessary to more accurately define the half-life of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. That said, this study provides hope that host immunity to this unpredictable and highly contagious virus may not be fleeting and may be similar to that elicited by most other viral infections.
Whether antibodies that persist confer protection and retain neutralizing or other protective effector functions that are required to block reinfection remains unclear. Nevertheless, the data reported by Stefansson and colleagues point to the utility of antibody assays as highly cost-effective alternatives to PCR testing for population-level surveillance, which is critical to the safe reopening of cities and schools, and as biomarkers and possible effectors of immunity — useful tools that we can deploy now, while we scan the horizon (and the pages of medical journals) for the wave of vaccines that will end the pandemic of Covid-19."
Full commentary: www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2028079