Abstract
The extent to which immune responses to natural infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and immunization with vaccines protect against variants of concern (VOC) is of increasing importance. Accordingly, here we analyse antibodies and T cells of a recently vaccinated, UK cohort, alongside those recovering from natural infection in early 2020. We show that neutralization of the VOC compared to a reference isolate of the original circulating lineage, B, is reduced: more profoundly against B.1.351 than for B.1.1.7, and in responses to infection or a single dose of vaccine than to a second dose of vaccine. Importantly, high magnitude T cell responses are generated after two vaccine doses, with the majority of the T cell response directed against epitopes that are conserved between the prototype isolate B and the VOC. Vaccination is required to generate high potency immune responses to protect against these and other emergent variants.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 5061 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 17 Aug 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information: Variant B.1.1.7 was isolated and rapidly shared by Kevin Bewley and colleagues within the National Infection Service at Public Health England, Porton Down UK. The customised coronavirus ELISA plates were a gift from Meso Scale Diagnostics, Rockville, MD USA. We thank OUH COVID research nurses and ISARIC. We are grateful for the advice of Professor EC Holmes, University of New South Wales, for advice on the lineage assignment of the isolates used in this study. This work was supported by the UK Department of Health and Social Care as part of the PITCH (Protective Immunity from T cells to Covid-19 in Health workers) Consortium, the UK Coronavirus Immunology Consortium (UK-CIC), National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) and the Huo Family Foundation. It was also directly funded by Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)/UKRI/NIHR COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant (COV19-RECPLA) and the National Core Study: Immunity (NCSi4P programme) ‘Optimal cellular assays for SARS-CoV-2 T cell, B cell and innate immunity’. E.B. and P.K. are NIHR Senior Investigators and P.K. is funded by WT109965MA and NIH (U19 I082360). S.D. is funded by an NIHR Global Research Professorship (NIHR300791). M.C., S.L. and T.T. are funded by a USA FDA grants HHSF223201510104C & 75F40120C00085 Characterization of severe coronavirus infection in humans and model systems for medical countermeasure development and evaluation. A.C.H. and W.J. are supported by University of Oxford Rapid COVID Response Fund, for which the contribution of donors is gratefully acknowledged. D.T.S. and A.J.M are NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturers. J.G.-J. is supported by Ecuadorian National Government Scholarship, M.L.K. is supported by the BBSRC. A.A. is a Wellcome Clinical Research Training Fellow (216417/Z/19/Z). P.K. and M.C. are in the National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit (NIHR HPRU) in Emerging and Zoonotic Infections (NIHR200907) at University of Liverpool in partnership with Public Health England (PHE), in collaboration with Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the University of Oxford. The C-MORE authors’ work was supported by NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, British Heart Foundation (BHF) Oxford Centre of Research Excellence (RE/18/3/34214), United Kingdom Research Innovation. The C-MORE Study is also funded by the Medical Research Council and Department of Health and Social Care/ National Institute for Health Research Grant (MR/V027859/1) ISRCTN number 10980107, as part of the collaborative research programme entitled PHOSP-COVID Post-hospitalisation COVID-19 study: a national consortium to understand and improve long-term health outcomes. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Health Service (NHS), the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), or the Medical Research Council (MRC).Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Publisher Copyright: © 2021, The Author(s).
Citation: Skelly, D.T., Harding, A.C., Gilbert-Jaramillo, J. et al. Two doses of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination induce robust immune responses to emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. Nat Commun 12, 5061 (2021).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25167-5
