Are you immune to the coronavirus disease after recovering from it?
The immune response, including duration of immunity, to SARS-CoV-2 infection is not yet understood.
6 days ago
At a Glance
The immune systems of more than 95% of people who recovered from COVID-19 had durable memories of the virus up to eight months after infection.
The results provide hope that people receiving SARS-CoV-2 vaccines will develop similar lasting immune memories after vaccination.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/antibodies-from-vaccines-and-from-natural-infection-5092564
Antibodies to the new coronavirus do seem to decrease in the months after infection. However, that happens for all infectious diseases. It doesn’t necessarily mean that immune protection is decreasing.
The B cells actively releasing the relevant antibody may decrease their production in the months after an infection. But memory B cells can continue to circulate in the bloodstream for years in other types of infections. Presumably, these B cells could again start releasing the relevant antibody if they were again exposed to the virus.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
Nucleic acid therapeutics have emerged as promising alternatives to conventional vaccine approaches. The first report of the successful use of in vitro transcribed (IVT) mRNA in animals was published in 1990, when reporter gene mRNAs were injected into mice and protein production was detected. A subsequent study in 1992 demonstrated that administration of vasopressin-encoding mRNA in the hypothalamus could elicit a physiological response in rats. However, these early promising results did not lead to substantial investment in developing mRNA therapeutics, largely owing to concerns associated with mRNA instability, high innate immunogenicity and inefficient in vivo delivery.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906052/
Current genomic therapy trials herald a new era in medicine. In the short term, cellular medicines that can be easily modified ex vivo by CRISPR genome therapeutics and then transplanted back into the body will robustly and rapidly enter the clinic. Examples of such modified cellular therapeutics include hematopoietic stem cell therapies, immune cell therapies and regenerative medicines derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. Genome therapeutics applied systemically or locally to intact tissues will inevitably produce enormous clinical benefit but delivery of such genome therapeutics is challenging. It is possible that none of the three delivery platforms described above can surmount the many challenges to in vivo genome editing and some more elaborate form of protein engineering will be needed to create a delivery platform capable of efficiently and specifically delivering a gene editing reagent to any desired tissue in the body. One can imagine construction of an engineered artificial virus that would have all of the desirable properties of a virus without limits to the delivery cargo or safety concerns. Our ability to construct or manipulate complex biological systems is rapidly advancing for biological discovery and bioengineering but application to medicine has lagged behind. With heightened interest garnered by the potential of CRISPR-based genome therapeutics, this may not be true for much longer.
