Do antibodies protect against a new corona infection? Apparently not necessarily, as Austrian scientists have now found out.
- Do antibodies that have formed protect recovered corona patients from a second infection?
- What has long been accepted may now be questioned.
- Here you will find the basic facts about the coronavirus * and the corona news from Germany . All information on the subject is also available on our Facebook page Corona-News.
Vienna - At the moment there is hardly any research into a topic as intensively as the coronavirus . Sars-CoV-2 is omnipresent in science. It is therefore not surprising that the level of research is constantly changing. Previous assumptions are adjusted or even rejected, and new perspectives are added. A completely normal process in scientific work *. Now there are new ideas regarding corona antibodies . Do they even protect against a second infection?
So far, the predominant assumption has been that protective antibodies are formed after a corona infection has been overcome . This seems to be successful in most cases, but it does not apply to all of the above, as Austrian researchers have now discovered.
How do antibodies protect against a second corona infection? The current state of research
The Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus uses proteins - certain proteins - to gain access to human cells. In the event of an infection, the body then produces special antibodies - protein molecules - against the virus. People survive a virus infection because their immune system produces neutralizing antibodies against the pathogen. The formation of these protective antibodies is therefore elementary in order to prevent a new outbreak of a disease such as Covid-19.
In their study, scientists from the Institute for Pathophysiology and Allergy Research at the Medical University of Vienna examined several test subjects who had survived a corona infection . They came to the surprising result that only about 60 percent of the participants develop protective antibodies . Accordingly, after surviving the disease, some corona patients develop antibodies that make it even easier for the virus to get into their body when it is attacked again.
In their study, the scientists examined data from a total of 25 test subjects. Protective antibodies developed in 15 people . However, they only inhibited the virus by more than 50 percent in six people.
There was no or a negative effect in ten people. Either because the virus simply could not be inhibited at all or because it was able to dock onto the relevant cells even better than before the infection. The second infection * is thus facilitated by an increased binding rate. A surprising result that does not necessarily match the current state of research.
The head of the economy worried about rising corona numbers: "Have to prevent another lockdown" @Lars_Feld #SVR #Konjektiven https://t.co/cgtTPbbTup
- Thomas Schmidtutz (@schmidtutz) July 30, 2020Coronavirus: Head of Research at the University of Vienna - "That potentially makes it even easier for the virus"
Research director Rudolf Valenta is quoted on the website of the Medical University of Vienna as saying: “This potentially makes it even easier for the virus to establish itself and spread.” Further research is now to find out what this new mechanism means for immunity and vaccine development.
Federal Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht has meanwhile made a proposal to relieve companies in the Corona crisis.
It remains to be seen how viable the results of the Austrian scientists are. In order to be able to finally assess this, the study would have to be replicated. In science, replication is the repeated finding of findings from previous research by repeating the same or a very similar study. In addition, it must be assessed to what extent the results are representative. So the work might have to be done with a larger sample than n = 25.
The British corona management seems anything but to run smoothly. Around 740,000 corona tests had to be recalled. There is now a “Corona village” in the Belgian city of Antwerp. Up to 600 people can be tested for the virus there every day. (as) * merkur.de is part of the nationwide Ippen-Digital editors network.
List of rubric lists: © Marijan Murat / dpa
