BBS Student Ellen Shrock is first author on the paper published this past week in Science.
The human body is capable of creating a vast, diverse repertoire of antibodies: immune proteins that find and flag invaders such as viruses. Yet humans create antibodies that target the same viral regions again and again, according to a new study led by investigators from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
This means that the generation of new antibodies is far from random and that a virus may be able to reinfect a population of previously immune hosts by changing a single one of its amino acids, the researchers found.
The team’s discoveries have implications for our understanding of immunity, durability of immune response, and public health and could inform the design of treatments and vaccines for SARS-CoV-2. The findings are published April 7 in Science.
Read more here: https://hms.harvard.edu/news/why-viruses-sars-cov-2-can-reinfect-us-evade-immune-response