COVID Transmissions for 1-12-2021

More evidence that B.1.1.7 does not break preexisting immunity

Good morning and welcome to COVID Transmissions.

It has been 422 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.

One quick headline today.

As usual, bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.

Keep the newsletter growing by sharing it! I love talking about science and explaining important concepts in human health, but I rely on all of you to grow the audience for this:

Now, let’s talk COVID.

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Does the B.1.1.7 lineage evade immunity?

If you’ve been following the newsletter lately, we’ve been talking about this new SARS-CoV-2 variant, B.1.1.7, first detected in the UK. One big concern about it is that it could evade immune responses to other lineages of SARS-CoV-2, which would be relatively bad news for the prospects of new vaccination campaigns.

Well, enter Dr. Akiko Iwasaki (star of yesterday’s headlines section as well, and in general a truly excellent virus immunologist—were I still a bench scientist I would be desperate to train with her), whose lab has now investigated how the changes in B.1.1.7 might interact with preexisting immunity. She has published these results as a preprint, so keep in mind please they are still subject to peer review.

You can read that preprint here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.06.20248960v1.full.pdf

This is an interesting study. They wanted to test the quality of natural immunity against the new variant’s sequence. To do this, they used a library of blood samples from 579 COVID-19 patients who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 from before B.1.1.7 was first detected, and looked at the ability of antibodies in these samples to react with the new variant.

This required some pretty fancy techniques, probably for lack of access to a facility where they could perform experiments directly with B.1.1.7. Instead, they used a technique called SERA to determine all the possible protein sequences that their patients samples could interact with, and then they compared this library of protein sequences to all protein sequences found in B.1.1.7. This is a complicated matching game, but I believe the logic of this approach is relatively sound. Ultimately, they found that only 0.5% of the COVID-19 patients had antibody responses that might have difficulty recognizing the new B.1.1.7 variant.

This is pretty reassuring, and while I think the use of an indirect technique complicates matters, it adds to a growing body to evidence that suggests B.1.1.7 does not evade preexisting COVID-19 immunity. That is great news.

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What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:

Writing accountability

Over the weekend, a good friend and I “got together” (via the Internet, of course), to just write for a couple of hours. We’re both fiction writers and we’d been struggling to maintain output through…everything going on. I didn’t have a good way to solve this problem until I took some inspiration from my wife.

She has been meeting with some fellow scholars to hold each other accountable for writing up their research. They meet on Zoom or similar, and chat for a short time, then set a timer and turn off audio and video until the timer is done. They’re expected to write during that time and then they link back up and tell each other what they’ve done.

This really works! My writing-friend and I made some good progress, and we’re going to try it again soon. If you’re feeling like creative pursuits have suffered during the pandemic, I recommend working with a buddy system like this.

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You might have some questions or comments! Send them in. As several folks have figured out, you can also email me if you have a comment that you don’t want to share with the whole group.

Join the conversation, and what you say will impact what I talk about in the next issue.

Also, let me know any other thoughts you might have about the newsletter. I’d like to make sure you’re getting what you want out of this.

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Part of science is identifying and correcting errors. If you find a mistake, please tell me about it.

Though I can’t correct the emailed version after it has been sent, I do update the online post of the newsletter every time a mistake is brought to my attention.

Correction: Apparently, autocorrect on my computer does not like the word “preprint” and replaced it several times with “reprint.” The paper I shared yesterday from Akiko Iwasaki’s lab was a preprint, not a reprint.

See you all next time.

Always,

JS