Correlates of protection against SARS-CoV-2 in rhesus macaques.

Recent studies have reported the protective efficacy of both natural1 and vaccine-induced2-7 immunity against challenge with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in rhesus macaques. However, the importance of humoral and cellular immunity for protection against infection with SARS-CoV-2 remains to be determined. Here we show that the adoptive transfer of purified IgG from convalescent rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) protects naive recipient macaques against challenge with SARS-CoV-2 in a dose-dependent fashion. Depletion of CD8+ T cells in convalescent macaques partially abrogated the protective efficacy of natural immunity against rechallenge with SARS-CoV-2, which suggests a role for cellular immunity in the context of waning or subprotective antibody titres. These data demonstrate that relatively low antibody titres are sufficient for protection against SARS-CoV-2 in rhesus macaques, and that cellular immune responses may contribute to protection if antibody responses are suboptimal. We also show that higher antibody titres are required for treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection in macaques. These findings have implications for the development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and immune-based therapeutic agents.

Citation

Katherine McMahan, Jingyou Yu, Noe B Mercado, Carolin Loos, Lisa H Tostanoski, Abishek Chandrashekar, Jinyan Liu, Lauren Peter, Caroline Atyeo, Alex Zhu, Esther A Bondzie, Gabriel Dagotto, Makda S Gebre, Catherine Jacob-Dolan, Zhenfeng Li, Felix Nampanya, Shivani Patel, Laurent Pessaint, Alex Van Ry, Kelvin Blade, Jake Yalley-Ogunro, Mehtap Cabus, Renita Brown, Anthony Cook, Elyse Teow, Hanne Andersen, Mark G Lewis, Douglas A Lauffenburger, Galit Alter, Dan H Barouch. Correlates of protection against SARS-CoV-2 in rhesus macaques. Nature. 2021 Feb;590(7847):630-634

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PMID: 33276369

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