Omicron antibody neutralization thread, with preliminary results, and substantial caveats. Most credit to @DannySheward. We’ve been racing to generate neutralization data as fast as possible, and our first results were read this afternoon (1/n).
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This was measured by a “pseudovirus assay”, which is one of the standard approaches for characterising antibody neutralization potency - the other being assays with live virus (5/n)
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In parallel, researchers in South Africa (
@sigallab) have been working on live virus neutralization assays, and their results show a much more substantial average reduction (6/n)Show this thread -
While the magnitude differs between our results and theirs, what is common is that neutralization is not completely lost for all samples, which is positive (7/n)
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There are many possible explanations for the differences between our results and those
@sigallab. Primarily, the patient cohorts were from different continents with different exposure histories (8/n)Show this thread -
Perhaps corroborating this view: a “WHO neutralization standard”, which is a pool of early plasma samples used to standardize these assays, showed a 40-fold loss of neutralization potency against Omicron relative to the founder variant in our assay (9/n)
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There are also multiple technical differences attributable to the assays themselves. We hope to learn more as results come in from all over the world (10/n)
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In the coming days, we will be repeating these assays, and attempting to deepen our understanding of the neutralisation resistance of Omicron, as well including other variants, which will help contextualise this (11/n)
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Key to all of this was the early sharing of data from South Africa (driven by
@Tuliodna), and the identification of S-gene target failures as a means of screening for Omicron samples, which is now used globally (12/n)Show this thread -
On our side,
@DannySheward has been exceptional in all this, as have key collaborators@NillaKH@AlecPnkw, and especially@Jan_Albert_ and his team for rapidly identifying and sharing a set of anonymised samples from suspected Omicron cases (13/n)Show this thread
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is this another study from the one reported earlier?Hopium!
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yes, completely different.
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