E. M. Anderson, E. Goodwin, A. Verma, C. P. Arevalo, M. Bolton, M. Weirick, S. Gouma, C. McAllister, S. R. Christensen, J. Weaver, Phillip Hicks, T. Manzoni, O. Oniyide, H. Ramage, D. Mathew, A. Baxter, D. Oldridge, A. Greenplate, Jennifer E. Wu, C. Alanio, K. D’Andrea, O. Kuthuru, J. Dougherty, A. Pattekar, Justin Kim, N. Han, S. Apostolidis, A. Huang, L. Vella, E. Wherry, N. Meyer, S. Cherry, P. Bates, D. Rader, S. Hensley
medRxiv, 2020
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has rapidly spread within the human population. Although SARS-CoV-2 is a novel coronavirus, most humans had been previously exposed to other antigenically distinct common seasonal human coronaviruses (hCoVs) before the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we quantified levels of SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies and hCoV-reactive antibodies in serum samples collected from 204 humans before the COVID-19 pandemic. We then quantified pre-pandemic antibody levels in serum from a separate cohort of 252 individuals who became PCR-confirmed infected with SARS-CoV-2. Finally, we longitudinally measured hCoV and SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the serum of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Our studies indicate that most individuals possessed hCoV-reactive antibodies before the COVID-19 pandemic. We determined that ~23% of these individuals possessed non-neutralizing antibodies that cross-reacted with SARS-CoV-2 spike and nucleocapsid proteins. These antibodies were not associated with protection against SARS-CoV-2 infections or hospitalizations, but paradoxically these hCoV cross-reactive antibodies were boosted upon SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Cited by 78 publications.
Field of study: Biology