SARS-CoV-2 501Y.V2 escapes neutralization by South African COVID-19 donor plasma

Corona's have been with mankind since before history. They never go away and its a matter of time before you are exposed to one of the coronas again.

1) it's in the spike protein. I think it's in the area that typically elicits antigen response. That's super bad news. If you look carefully, it's near the cleft of a representative antibody (fig 1a), and the buried surface area is high across the board on (clinically?) sampled antibodies (fig 1e), suggesting its importance.

2) it's a mutation that changes the charge state of one of the amino acid residues. E->K, changes a negative charge to a positive charge, potentially very bad if typically antibodies have a positive surface charge to interact with it, now they will be repelled. Since individual humans make random antibodies, even if there is no charge interaction, K amino acid is bigger than E, and so there is likely a shape interaction that could get disrupted by the "new bump" in the spike.

Is it a serious cause for concern? Yeah, almost certainly. The current round of vaccinations will probably be rendered inactive.

IMO the fastest way around this is to quickly approve a reformulation of the moderna/pfizer vaccines that encode for the new amino acid, or better yet, a cocktail of both.

For the more traditional protein-based vaccines, it could be more challenging, because the gut feeling is that an amino acid change like this could pose more of a risk to the effectiveness of the formulation for delivery of the vaccine (mrna is more "neutral" information medium that typically exerts less of a chemical change to the delivered product when altered).

In any case this emergent phenomenon will be certainly challenging to the regulatory landscape around vaccination.

disclaimer: I own MRNA stock.

It's been a full year since the first vaccines were formulated, and it took the FDA 11 months to give the OK. That was a large streamlining of their normal processes, but not a meaningful balancing of risk, the standards remained the same.

In the meantime, the virus has had millions of opportunities to mutate like this. If we'd accepted a bit more risk, we could have significantly decreased its opportunities to mutate.

At least in this case, the virus can't mutate faster than our ability to formulate a new vaccine. Whether we can retool vaccine manufacturing I don't know. But so long as the FDA won't allow us to react quickly, the hole we're in keeps getting deeper.