Antibody from cold can neutralize COVID-19 and could lead to vaccine against all coronaviruses:
Both the common cold and SARS-CoV-2 fall under a family known as coronaviruses, which cause upper-respiratory tract illnesses.
However, it was believed that antibodies that react to ordinary coronaviruses didn't work against the virus that leads to COVID.
But in blood samples of COVID survivors, researchers found high levels of immune cells generated during the common cold that 'remember' diseases and are called back into action if the threat returns.
The team, from the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California, says the findings could help scientists develop a vaccine or antibody treatment that protects against all coronaviruses.
The team found the antibody is produced by a type of immune system cell known as a memory B cell.
Memory B cells lock onto the surface of invading pathogens and mark them for destruction by other immune cells.
They also can circulate in the bloodstream for years – even decades – and the immune system can call up on them if there is another infection.
[...] Results showed that levels of memory B cell antibodies were higher in blood samples of people who had been infected with COVID-19 than those who never had been.
Journal Reference:
Ge Song, Wan-ting He, Sean Callaghan, et al. Cross-reactive serum and memory B-cell responses to spike protein in SARS-CoV-2 and endemic coronavirus infection [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23074-3)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @11:28AM (22 children)
If anyone who's had a cold in the last decade was immune to COVID, then all the lockdowns and masks were just a charade. Who would have thought Trump was right?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 01 2021, @12:01PM (8 children)
That isn't what the article says at all.
COVID is a member of the family of viruses that cause the "common cold". You may or may not be aware that several different viruses cause the "common cold". That is, you might be immune to one, or three, or twelve different cold viruses, and still get a cold because there are a buttload other viruses that cause the same symptoms. Additionally, you might develop an immunity to any one cold virus, only to catch that same virus again five or ten years later.
The article says they might maybe have a new line of attack against ALL SARS viruses. Meaning, if it works out like they hope, they will not only cure COVID, but the common cold as well. And, maybe a few other odd diseases caused by SARS viruses.
Back to your seeming idea that having a cold should make you immune to COVID - maybe it does, to some degree. If you had a cold that was similar enough to the COVID/SARS2 virus, you just might fight off an infection. Or, it might explain why some people are asymptomatic.
Or, maybe a whole bunch of other crap. Nobody knows yet, nobody is real sure, but the researchers are working on what they do know.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday June 01 2021, @12:44PM (7 children)
What does the article say, then? (TLDR)
If it is just cross-reactivity, that is close to meaningless as it does not imply anything you need for immunity (like being neutralizing). If it is a hope of deriving a universal antigen, it remains a hope. In HIV, for example, we know all antigens, yet a stable, neutralizing antibody response could not be induced so far by vaccines.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Tuesday June 01 2021, @03:10PM (6 children)
OTOH, if it *is* an antibody from a "common cold" infection, that's likely bad news, as the immunity doesn't persist. Yes, there are lots of different "cold" viruses, but I've been informed by someone who *should* know that the immunity doesn't last over a year. (IIRC he actually said paraphrase"in around 6 months you can get reinfected with the same coronavirus that you recovered from"). Well, AFAIK, he wasn't reporting on a scientific study, so don't invest too much belief in that. OTOH, I'd put the odds at well over 50% that he was correct. Other sources have said that many coronaviruses have a mechanism (unspecified) that sabotages durable immunity.
FWIW, the real experts that I'm familiar with are refusing to commit themselves over whether durable immunity to COVID is possible. And this isn't a question of mutated strains, which are another problem, though I'm told that it's probably less of a problem with coronaviruses than with influenza, as the target regions are less mutable. (OTOH, there's that new strain from India that some have said uses a different attack, so don't put too much faith in that, either. But perhaps the new attack will be more subject to a durable immunity. Lots of "if"'s and "I'm told"'s in there, so any real certainty is unwarranted.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @03:19PM
OTOH, that doesn't seem to matter as the immune response is rather mild once you have the initial antibodies. This is actually the reason to be optimistic about COVID - it's now believed once you are vaccinated and maybe had a booster or two, the disease could be relegated to "another type of cold" instead of sucking O2 through a tube and overwhelming hospitals even when only a small fraction of the population is exposed.
So, COVID19 could become 'just a cold' in a few years. Until then, it may make a few idiots disappear from the planet along with quite a few others that had no choice (thanks to the COVID idiots that spread it)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @05:20PM
The summary is incorrect (or, at least, incomplete), "Both the common cold and SARS-CoV-2 fall under a family known as coronaviruses."
Rihnoviruses are the most common cause of the "common cold". Corona viruses also cause what we call the "common cold", but this is rarer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinovirus [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday June 01 2021, @05:35PM
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n99 [bmj.com]
"What we know about covid-19 reinfection so far"
Published 19 January 2021 (editors note obviously five months out of date)
"Worldwide, 31 confirmed cases of covid-19 reinfection have been recorded, although that could be an underestimate from delays in reporting and resource pressures in the ongoing pandemic."
(Editors note: I suspect this will be something like the difference between "theoretical in the lab" vs "IRL" as seen in the historical ineffectiveness of masks)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday June 02 2021, @02:24AM (2 children)
Forget where I saw it, but there was just a report that tested SARS-1 survivors still have good immunity, 16-17 years later.
Canine coronavirus appears to generate permanent immunity in dogs (and I strongly suspect also cross-immunity with Covid).
So not like it's out of the question that we might also have durable immunity; if anything, more likely than not. But given the current climate, everyone is covering their ass.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 02 2021, @03:11AM (1 child)
The thing is, there are lots of different corona viruses, and they don't act the same way. SARS is a reasonable choice to guess from, as COVID is in many ways like SARS, but you need to realize that it's a GUESS.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday June 02 2021, @03:21AM
Yep, educated guess, but hardly a sure thing.
But it's unusual for virus immunity to be short-term. So I'll be astonished if the "six months" worst-case speculation is anywhere close to correct; IMO that statement was entirely CYA.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Bloopie on Tuesday June 01 2021, @02:14PM (3 children)
1. Completely misinterpret and misquote the article you have read, to the point that anyone with more than a quarter of a brain thinks you're a slobbering idiot.
2. With smugness dripping from your face, proclaim that Trump was right.
3. Profit!
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday June 01 2021, @03:24PM (1 child)
Calm down. OP expressed what was my very first thought as well, so kicked of the discussion alright. OP was also going for a punch line. Well, we know where this ends most of the time.
(Score: 3, Touché) by VLM on Tuesday June 01 2021, @05:59PM
Should have stuck to traditional soylent automobile analogies.
If you spray underbody rust goop on the underside of a specific family of GM car, lets say, an Oldsmobile, samples taken months later indicate some goop remains under the car, possibly preventing rust. Researchers are optimistic that underbody rust spray might work to prevent corrosion on all vehicles, or at least multiple families of automobiles.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Tuesday June 01 2021, @11:04PM
The what?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday June 01 2021, @02:18PM
One meets all sorts, I suppose. I personally would have logged in to gloat, bask in all the glory.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 5, Informative) by mydn on Tuesday June 01 2021, @04:55PM
A dumbass.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @06:41PM (3 children)
They broke families apart, trashed all the cities, oversaw a large transfer of wealth from small business to giants like Amazon (destroying many livelihoods and businesses in the process) destroyed Black credibility, demoralized the police and everybody in the military not a political appointee, caused a whole generation of children to distrust the world around them (and likely become dependent on big Pharma by design), coerced people into becoming beta-testers for dangerous vaccines (again, to become dependent on big pharma by design), laundered a shitload of money, stole an election, disenfranchised girls and women from sports awards and scholarships with the inclusion of trans "men;" and throughout that whole process actively censored everybody who dared point any of that out, even threatening them with legal action, only to reverse course and pretend they never did as they're forced to slow-walk the truth out to the public.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @07:58PM (2 children)
and every tv show, "news", and movie is full of anti-white propaganda while the federal government is openly working against whites. This is not unarmed, peasant russia in the early 20th century. These neo-bolsheviks are all going to die.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @08:06PM (1 child)
Poor victim! Poor persecuted victim!
But you're gonna show them.
You're gonna haul your 450-lb. frame out of your mother's basement and you're gonna show them. Any year now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:29AM
Stop mocking our lard-ass AC like that. He's down to 450 pounds from 520, give him some encouragement!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02 2021, @06:08PM
Yup, only 600,000 Americans died in a year from it, basically doubling the death rate, so you know, no biggie.
Some people...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02 2021, @07:19PM (1 child)
the article is really misleading. Most colds are rhinoviruses or novoviruses, the vast majority of colds are not coronaviruses. Additionally they showed that a similar mechanism for natural immunity exists for covid-19 as does for other coronaviruses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02 2021, @07:34PM
*not novovirus, my mistake, just meant to say rhinovirus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @02:54PM (6 children)
There have been reports of blood samples with COVID antibodies that predate Dec 2019. I wonder if this is the cause. On a worrying note, if there already was a close relative of COVID-19 already circulating in the human population then that opens up opportunities for cross-breeding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @02:56PM (1 child)
I think reproduction is completely asexual. No "cross breeding" is likely.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday June 01 2021, @03:16PM
While "crossbreeding" is an incorrect description of the process, multiple infections with similar viruses does allow a chance for the genetic codes to merge or exchange components. Crossbreeding is a reasonable analog of that process, and the only one that commonly happens on the same scale that we live on. (OTOH, at some point the pea plant acquired hemoglobin from a chordate, even if it uses it for a totally different function. So it does occasionally happen, probably by clumsy copying by a virus...which is how you get the viral "crossbreeding" referred to.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday June 01 2021, @05:51PM (2 children)
More likely false positives. Seems very difficult to find any data at all on false positive rates.
Googling for "False positives in reverse transcription PCR testing for SARS-CoV-2 Andrew N. Cohen Bruce Kessel"
found a report of 0.3% to 3% false positive rates.
Two interesting things to think about.
1) Even at the lower end, 0.3% of the blood supply from before the Dec 2019 lab release would be expected to test positive. It would be statistically interesting if the percentage varied over time or was "much" larger than the 0.3 to 3.0 range expected.
2) The paper uses South Korea as an example where if you do 6000 tests per day and the false positive rate is the minimum reported, the number of reported daily cases in South Korea will never drop below 18.
From covid19.healthdata.org my home state did 353 tests a month ago and projected 363 yesterday. Confirmed infections was in the mid 800s a month ago and has declined to about 500 now. All thats really changed is we got rid of the mask mandate and nobody is wearing masks anymore.
It seems covid cases went up when people wore masks and drop when people unmask, almost as if there's no relationship at all, which seems very likely.
(Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday June 01 2021, @05:53PM (1 child)
Editors note: Per my relatives that still live in my home state. I have no subjective data of my own other than phone call discussions. Seems a nationwide / worldwide effect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02 2021, @09:32PM
Hey lookie that, you're not alone! There are plenty of other idiots too!
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Wednesday June 02 2021, @12:09AM
Really good question. I had just been reading about this. One question raised about the September 2019 blood samples was whether the testing was really specific to SARS COV 2 antibodies.
The Italian cancer doctors said they'd tried other coronaviruses and not found antibody reaction, if memory serves.
Even if that's wrong, though, there was actual virus in wastewater in Milan and Turin by December 2019.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Spamalope on Tuesday June 01 2021, @02:57PM (4 children)
From the article, they found antibodies formed after CV19 that is cross-reactive with other corona viruses.
Their informed suspicion is that they're formed by memory B-cells.
They found that the antibody binds to the base of the spike protein (S protein) on coronaviruses. That may confer broad immunity or at least resistance.
They tested against Sars 1, and found this antibody effective against it! (this is good news - Sars 1 is far, far more deadly)
So... they may have found a was to give broad resistance against coronaviruses as a class. They've taken the first steps towards verifying the underlying biology and found very promising results so far. So, the huge effort to modernize vaccine tech using what we've learned in the past ~50 years may have an unexpected payoff - a way to at least reduce the severity of the common cold and possibly wipe some or most strains. It's too soon to cheer but this actually does look nifty (click bait stuff aside).
I'm interested in the cancer fighting tech coming from mRNA viral tech. I hope this recent effort has pushed that along as well. We should at least have a huge amount of safety data that's partly applicable. (at least as to the viral delivery method)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @08:09PM (1 child)
If you have symptoms from colds or "The Covid" you're a weakling that might need to be culled by nature. I haven't had a cold or flu in 25 years and the last time i did get sick i was chain smoking and drinking all night and then working construction all day with 3 hrs sleep. You can prevent and treat cancer with diet (including Turkey Tail mushrooms). No Big Pharma scum necessary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:39AM
Just flip your little silly tirade on it's head.
Or maybe you prefer measles/mumps/rubella/polio/ect ad nauseum. Or allergies. Just anything that YOU have not fallen victim to, right?
I'll agree that a lot of crap can be prevented, alleviated, or even cured with proper diet. But, sorry, you're not nearly so smart as you think you are. EVERYONE has their weakness, just like everyone has their strength. Those differences are exactly what ensures that life goes on. The worst plagues in history didn't kill EVERYONE after all - just the weak.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @11:01PM
This information isn't exactly new, beyond their evidence of MBC involvement. There are already a number of universal Coronavirus vaccines in human testing. The initial results appear to be quite promising. At least one provides coverage against the whole family of viruses according to tests where it provided immunity to every sample they could test it against, including a number that don't infect humans.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Wednesday June 02 2021, @12:14AM
Spock to McCoy:
"You may yet one day cure the common cold".
A universal coronavirus vaccine would only prevent some fraction of common colds, though.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Tuesday June 01 2021, @02:58PM (2 children)
Reading the headline, it sounds like antibodies from the Common Cold help protect you against COVID-19, but the article doesn't say that. Score 1 for the marketing, -1 for teaching method.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:47AM (1 child)
Several people, myself included, have erroneously talked about antibodies here. It isn't the antibodies that are remarkable here, it's the memory B cells. To overly simplify, it seems that those memory B cells might mistake the SARS2 virus for cold viruses that they have encountered in the past. That B cell raises the alarm, attaches itself to the SARS2 virus, then the immune system kicks in to produce the antibodies that the B cell is screaming for. Apparently, the immune system is sophisticated enough to produce antibodies targeted at the SARS COV2 virus, instead of the virus that the memory B cell mistook it for.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday June 02 2021, @03:07PM
I have the impression that it's not so much immune system sophistication as 1 of 2 other things: the same immune technique blocks the virus from attaching to a cell, or similarities between the old virus and the new provoke a response that targets similarities between them.