Neutralising antibodies prevent infection by binding to a virus and blocking their ability to infect. After an infection, a host can produce neutralising antibodies to protect against future infection. “The speed with which SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has spread around the world and its toll in numbers of cases, severe illness, and death has been staggering,” she said.

“However, technological advances have made rapid vaccine development possible. We have to ask ourselves what the new vaccines should aim to achieve – prevent all infection or prevent severe disease and death? In which age group(s)? What effect will vaccines that address these choices have on subsequent epidemics?”

How they worked on SARS in 2003?

Professor Subbarao was the Chief of the Emerging Respiratory Viruses Section of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease at the US National Institutes of Health during the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003, and was central to an important discovery of how neutralising antibodies protect from infection.

Halden’s technique boasts high sensitivity, with the potential to detect the signature of a single infected individual among 100 to 2 million persons. To accomplish this, wastewater samples are screened for the presence of nucleic acid fragments of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The RNA genomes are amplified through a process known as reverse-transcriptase quantitative PCR (RT qPCR) / CREDIT: Shireen Dooling

“We used mouse experiments to establish the very important principle that neutralising antibodies alone were sufficient to protect them from SARS-CoV infection,” Professor Subbarao described.

She also explained the crucial discovery that the ‘spike’ protein of the virus induced neutralising antibodies, and the importance of animal trials of several SARS vaccine candidates. Coronavirus particles have a corona (crown) of spike proteins that allow the virus to attach and enter cells.

“The ‘spike’ proteins of both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are related and they attach to the same molecule called ACE 2 on human cells to infect people. We now also know through animal experiments with SARS-CoV-2 that neutralising antibodies protect from reinfection,” Professor Subbarao said.

“Two SARS vaccines were evaluated in humans, and a number of promising candidates were tested in pre-clinical studies, but they weren’t pursued because SARS didn’t re-emerge. “However, the work on SARS is relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic because the two viruses share several features and many of the principles and experience with SARS vaccines will apply to SARS-CoV-2.”