Antibody evasion properties of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron sublineages
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Discuss this preprint
Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
The identification of the Omicron (B.1.1.529.1 or BA.1) variant of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Botswana in November 2021 1 immediately caused concern owing to the number of alterations in the spike glycoprotein that could lead to antibody evasion. We 2 and others 3–6 recently reported results confirming such a concern. Continuing surveillance of the evolution of Omicron has since revealed the rise in prevalence of two sublineages, BA.1 with an R346K alteration (BA.1+R346K, also known as BA.1.1) and B.1.1.529.2 (BA.2), with the latter containing 8 unique spike alterations and lacking 13 spike alterations found in BA.1. Here we extended our studies to include antigenic characterization of these new sublineages. Polyclonal sera from patients infected by wild-type SARS-CoV-2 or recipients of current mRNA vaccines showed a substantial loss in neutralizing activity against both BA.1+R346K and BA.2, with drops comparable to that already reported for BA.1 (refs. 2,3,5,6 ). These findings indicate that these three sublineages of Omicron are antigenically equidistant from the wild-type SARS-CoV-2 and thus similarly threaten the efficacies of current vaccines. BA.2 also exhibited marked resistance to 17 of 19 neutralizing monoclonal antibodies tested, including S309 (sotrovimab) 7 , which had retained appreciable activity against BA.1 and BA.1+R346K (refs. 2–4,6 ). This finding shows that no authorized monoclonal antibody therapy could adequately cover all sublineages of the Omicron variant, except for the recently authorized LY-CoV1404 (bebtelovimab).
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2022.02.07.479306: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: All collections were conducted under protocols reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Columbia University. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization The experiments were not randomized and the investigators were not blinded to allocation during experiments and outcome assessment. Blinding The experiments were not randomized and the investigators were not blinded to allocation during experiments and outcome assessment. Power Analysis Data reporting: No statistical methods were used to predetermine sample size. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged …
SciScore for 10.1101/2022.02.07.479306: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: All collections were conducted under protocols reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Columbia University. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization The experiments were not randomized and the investigators were not blinded to allocation during experiments and outcome assessment. Blinding The experiments were not randomized and the investigators were not blinded to allocation during experiments and outcome assessment. Power Analysis Data reporting: No statistical methods were used to predetermine sample size. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
-
