Bartels, M.; Sala Solé, E.; Sauerschnig, L.M.; Rijkers, G.T. Back to the Future: Immune Protection or Enhancement of Future Coronaviruses. Microorganisms2024, 12, 617.
Bartels, M.; Sala Solé, E.; Sauerschnig, L.M.; Rijkers, G.T. Back to the Future: Immune Protection or Enhancement of Future Coronaviruses. Microorganisms 2024, 12, 617.
Bartels, M.; Sala Solé, E.; Sauerschnig, L.M.; Rijkers, G.T. Back to the Future: Immune Protection or Enhancement of Future Coronaviruses. Microorganisms2024, 12, 617.
Bartels, M.; Sala Solé, E.; Sauerschnig, L.M.; Rijkers, G.T. Back to the Future: Immune Protection or Enhancement of Future Coronaviruses. Microorganisms 2024, 12, 617.
Abstract
Before the emergence of SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, and most recently SARS-CoV-2, al-ready four other coronaviruses have been circulating in the human population. The alpha coronaviruses NL63 and 229E and the beta coronaviruses OC34 and HKU1. These circulating coronaviruses all cause mild respiratory illness during the winter seasons and most people are already infected in early life. Could antibodies and/or T cells, es-pecially against the beta coronaviruses have offered some form of protection against SARS-CoV-2? Related is the question whether survivors of SARS-CoV-1 or MERS-CoV would be relatively protected against SARS-CoV-2. More importantly, would humoral and cellular immunological memory, generated during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, ei-ther by infection or vaccination offer protection against future coronaviruses? Or rather than protection, could antibody dependent enhancement have taken place, a mecha-nism by which circulating corona antibodies enhance the severity of COVID-19? An-other related phenomenon, the original antigen sin, would also predict that the effec-tivity of the immune response to future coronaviruses would be impaired because of reactivation of memory against irrelevant epitopes. Current available evidence indicates that latter scenarios are highly unlikely and that especially cytotoxic memory T cells directed against conserved epitopes of human coronaviruses could at least offer partial protection against future coronaviruses.
Keywords
SARS-CoV-2; COVID-19; human coronaviruses; conserved T cell epitopes; antibody dependent enhancement; original antigenic sin.
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Immunology and Microbiology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
