Antibody Resistance of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.1, BA.1.1, BA.2 and BA.3 Sub-lineages

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Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant has been partitioned into four sub-lineages designated BA.1, BA.1.1, BA.2 and BA.3, with BA.2 becoming dominant worldwide recently by outcompeting BA.1 and BA.1.1. We and others have reported the striking antibody evasion of BA.1 and BA.2, but side-by-side comparison of susceptibility of all the major Omicron sub-lineages to vaccine-elicited or monoclonal antibody (mAb)-mediated neutralization are urgently needed. Using VSV-based pseudovirus, we found that sera from individuals vaccinated by two doses of inactivated whole-virion vaccines (BBIBP-CorV) showed very weak to no neutralization activity, while a homologous inactivated vaccine booster or a heterologous booster with protein subunit vaccine (ZF2001) markedly improved the neutralization titers against all Omicron variants. The comparison between sub-lineages indicated that BA.1.1, BA.2 and BA.3 had comparable or even greater antibody resistance than BA.1. We further evaluated the neutralization profile of a panel of 20 mAbs, including 10 already authorized or approved, against these Omicron sub-lineages as well as viruses with different Omicron spike single or combined mutations. Most mAbs lost their neutralizing activity completely or substantially, while some demonstrated distinct neutralization patterns among Omicron sub-lineages, reflecting their antigenic difference. Taken together, our results suggest all four Omicron sub-lineages threaten the efficacies of current vaccines and antibody therapeutics, highlighting the importance of vaccine boosters to combat the emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2022.04.07.487489: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIRB: All collections were conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Ethics Committee of Huashan Hospital (2021-041 and 2021-749).
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    RandomizationSequence alignment and phylogenetic tree: This analysis involved 200 nucleotide sequences, including 50 samples for each lineage randomly selected from the GISAID database.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Cell Line Authenticationnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Experimental Models: Cell Lines
    SentencesResources
    Expi293 cells were grown to 3×106/mL before transfection with the indicated spike gene using Polyethylenimine (Polyscience).
    Expi293
    suggested: RRID:CVCL_D615)
    In brief, Vero E6 cells were seeded in a 96-well plate at a concentration of 2×104 cells per well.
    Vero E6
    suggested: None
    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    The IC50 values were calculated using nonlinear regression in GraphPad Prism.
    GraphPad Prism
    suggested: (GraphPad Prism, RRID:SCR_002798)
    Sequence alignment was carried out using ClustalW progress33 and corrected manually.
    ClustalW
    suggested: (ClustalW, RRID:SCR_017277)

    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.


    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.