Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic presently the Delta variant has become the dominant variant of the virus and has caused a significant spike in infections in various countries which has ultimately resulted in thousands of hospitalisations and deaths.
In this scenario, the first thing that comes to mind is how effective are the COVID-19 vaccines against this virulent variant?
Hence, according to a new study has been published in the journal Immunity, the Delta variant of COVID-19 is not particularly good at avoiding the antibodies generated by the Pfizer vaccine.
In this study, it is explained why vaccinated people have mostly escaped the worst of the Delta rise.
The neutralising antibody
The researchers from Washington University’s School of Medicine in St. Louis in the US extracted antibody-producing cells from three people who had received the Pfizer vaccine for the purpose of the study. For the process, they grew the cells in the laboratory and obtained a set of 13 antibodies that target the original strain that began spreading last year. Twelve of the 13 of these antibodies were recognized as alpha and delta while eight of them were recognised as all four variants, and one failed to recognise any of the four variants and five of the 13 antibodies neutralised the original strain. The researchers tested the antibodies against four variants of concern: alpha, beta, gamma and delta.
When the team tested the neutralising antibodies against the new variants, all five antibodies neutralised the delta variant, three neutralised alpha and delta, and only one neutralised all four variants.
Efficacy of naturally occurring antibodies
The antibody that neutralised all four variants of concern was called 2C08 and the researchers earlier saw that this antibody 2C08 also protected hamsters from disease caused by every variant tested: the original variant, delta and a similar of beta.
According to researchers, some people may have antibodies that are just as powerful as 2C08, which provides them protection against coronavirus and its various variants. The researchers using publicly available databases found that around 20 per cent of people who were infected or vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 create antibodies that recognize the same spot on the virus that is targeted by 2C08. Moreover, very few virus variants (.008 per cent) carry mutations that allow them to escape antibodies targeting that spot.
