41–50 of 131 posts
This is the one headline I’m constantly afraid of reading... do any HN biotech experts have any comments or feedback? Is this a serious cause for concern?
Pulling directly from TFA, > Here we show that this lineage exhibits complete escape from three classes of therapeutically relevant monoclonal antibodies. Furthermore 501Y.V2 shows substantial or complete escape from neutralizing antibodies in COVID-19 convalescent plasma. These data highlight the prospect of reinfection with antigenically distinct variants and may foreshadow reduced efficacy of current spike-based v…
exiting discussion
The Moderna vaccine was ready in approximately a day, at least as a first draft. All of the work was in regulatory, validation, etc.
My hope is that we can validate and approve minor tweaks to the vaccine much more quickly.
Interesting... the common cold and the flu also tend to mutate to be resistant to past immunity. I wonder if we’re on a the cusp of finally finding cures for these types of rapidly mutating viruses.
Or you could just wear a mask and social distance and not congregate indoors with random strangers for long periods of time
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Understood, but if we can contain the mutations regionally, it’s better than having them spread globally.
I think you lost me. How can we have an unfettered economy, not limited by lockdowns AND contain mutations regionally? These two statements you have made seem to be at odds with one another. Or am I overthinking/underthinking this?
I for one am not concerned. The true mortality rate appears to be 65. What does that mean? To put it into perspective you may only know one person in your friend group which knows one person who dies. Your friends / family are more likely to die of cancer. How often do you know someone die of cancer? It's definitely unfortunate; we should all socially distance & wear N95's where possible. All of us can decide if we w…
I for one am not concerned. The true mortality rate appears to be 65. What does that mean? To put it into perspective you may only know one person in your friend group which knows one person who dies. Your friends / family are more likely to die of cancer. How often do you know someone die of cancer? It's definitely unfortunate; we should all socially distance & wear N95's where possible. All of us can decide if we w…
This is the one headline I’m constantly afraid of reading... do any HN biotech experts have any comments or feedback? Is this a serious cause for concern?
"To determine whether 501Y.V2 is still recognized by non-neutralizing antibodies, the binding of polyclonal sera (from Fig.2a) to a recombinant 501Y.V2 RBD+SBD1 protein and an RBD+SBD1 from the original lineage was assessed by ELISA (Fig.2b). These data revealed that binding of polyclonal plasma to 501Y.V2 RBD+SBD1 was only substantially affected in a minority of cases (14 of 44 with ≥five-fold reduction, 32%). Most of the convalescent plasma/serum suffered less than four-fold reductions in total binding activity (as measured by area under the curve), suggesting a considerable non-neutralizing antibody component are still able to bind the 501Y.V2 spike antigen"
Interesting... the common cold and the flu also tend to mutate to be resistant to past immunity. I wonder if we’re on a the cusp of finally finding cures for these types of rapidly mutating viruses.
Or you could just wear a mask and social distance and not congregate indoors with random strangers for long periods of time
Pulling directly from TFA, > Here we show that this lineage exhibits complete escape from three classes of therapeutically relevant monoclonal antibodies. Furthermore 501Y.V2 shows substantial or complete escape from neutralizing antibodies in COVID-19 convalescent plasma. These data highlight the prospect of reinfection with antigenically distinct variants and may foreshadow reduced efficacy of current spike-based v…
Yeah, this is not great news. I hope the vaccine makers are looking at adding coverage for these variants to the existing vaccines. That should be relatively easy to do for the mRNA vaccines, but possibly harder for the adenovirus based vaccines like the Oxford/AZ and the J&J. The question is whether they would have to go through a full phase 3 trial for this kind of addition or would this be more like how we add cov…
That isn't super obvious to me anymore, after it was pointed out to me that the current mRNA vaccines rely on a modified sequence for the spike protein, designed to make the protein stable enough to be usable in the vaccine process (described here [1] as "antigen S-2P" - "S" for "Spike" and "2P" for the two proline substitutions in the sequence). It's my understanding that this work dates to 2017 [2], and that it might not be quick or easy to replicate for new spike protein variants.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00480-0
[2] Pallesen, J. et al. Immunogenicity and structures of a rationally designed prefusion MERS-CoV spike antigen. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, E7348–E7357 (2017).
A new mutation of COVID19 has been discovered in an South African donor. With this mutation, the spike protein changed which might render all existing vaccinations less effective or even ineffective.
From the article: "These data highlight the prospect of reinfection with antigenically distinct variants and may foreshadow reduced efficacy of current spike-based vaccines." So it suggests that only spike-based vaccines may have reduced efficacy against it. I suppose the inactivated-virus vaccines should be fine. Which would put China and India at huge advantage ( https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/cor…