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Editor's Note
August 18, 2020

Neutralizing Antibodies Against SARS-CoV-2—Important Questions, Unclear Answers

Author Affiliations
  • 1NYC Health + Hospitals, New York, New York
  • 2Deputy Editor, JAMA Internal Medicine
JAMA Intern Med. 2020;180(10):1362. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.4624

As clinicians struggling to care for patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, we most want to read reports on randomized clinical trials of promising treatments or vaccines. However, descriptive epidemiologic studies can help us to develop those interventions.

In that spirit, I found the description of the development of neutralizing antibodies among patients with mild SARS-CoV-2 infection in China in this issue of JAMA Internal Medicine of interest.1 The authors describe substantial variability in the development of these antibodies. To the extent that these antibodies help patients to recover or protect against infection, it is important to understand why some patients develop a stronger antibody response than other patients. In this study, higher antibody levels were seen in men, older patients, and those with indicators of stronger immunologic response, as well as older persons; however, men, older patients, and those with stronger inflammatory response and older age have generally fared worse, suggesting that the higher titers of antibodies do not necessarily lead to higher recovery rate. As this study looked only at patients with mild disease who survived, it could not correlate antibody levels with prognosis, and so we do not know whether certain groups need higher antibody levels to overcome the illness. Equally unclear is whether higher levels of antibody production, generally seen as an intermediary indicator of vaccine success, will result in greater protection against the virus. In this study, 10 of 175 patients had undetectable antibody levels despite documented infection. Are these patients susceptible to future infection, or do they have protection based on their infection sensitizing killer T cells or memory B cells? Answers to these pointed questions can lead to better protection when faced with this still largely unknown adversary.

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Article Information

Published Online: August 18, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.4624

Corresponding Author: Mitchell H. Katz, MD, NYC Health + Hospitals, 125 Worth St, Room 514, New York, NY 10013 (mitchell.katz@nychhc.org).

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.

References
1.
Wu  F, Liu  M, Wang  A,  et al.  Evaluating the association of clinical characteristics with neutralizing antibody levels in patients who have recovered from mild COVID-19 in Shanghai, China.   JAMA Intern Med. Published online August 18, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.4616Google Scholar
2 Comments for this article
Immune responses clearing CoVID
Camilo Colaco, PhD | ImmunoBiology Ltd
Could it be that both nAb and non-nAb can clear viral infections and that both B- and T-cells are in the immune response against CoVID-19 and that either/both are capable of clearing a mild infection?
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None Reported
Antibody isotype effect?
Camilo Colaco, PhD | ImmunoBiology Ltd
As neutralizing antibodies of different isotypes would interact with different dendritic/myeloid cell types, leading to different functional outcomes, maybe the study of antibody responses in CoVID19 patients should include isotype data to enable informative analyses of protective responses.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None Reported
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