July 15, 2020

expert reaction to study looking at SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS and uninfected controls from data from Singapore

A study, published in Nature, has looked at data from Singapore for of SARS-CoV-2 specific T-cell immunity, including cases of COVID-19 and SARS as well as uninfected controls.

Prof Daniel Altmann, Professor of Immunology, Imperial College London, said:

“This is among the first publications to closely map the parts of the virus targeted by T cells.  In doing so, the team have looked at the virus beyond just the Spike that people often focus on.  This allows the team to make a number of interesting conclusions.  Being in Singapore, they could access blood samples from patients who had SARS some 17 years ago.  The news was, not just that immunity was cross-reactive with the new virus, but that it was detectable all these years later.  Then they looked at T cell immunity in blood samples collected from healthy people, prior to Covid19.  They found cross-reactive immunity to some parts of the virus, seemingly stimulated by exposure to common-cold coronaviruses.  The key questions: are these cross-reactive viruses special to Singapore or will they be found elsewhere and, importantly, can the responses be associated with protection?”

‘SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls’ by Nina Le Bert et al. was published in Nature on Wednesday 15 July 2020.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2550-z

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.