COVID Antibody from Common Cold reacts to COVID

[Tom.G]

THIS POST TITLE IS MISLEADING. I paraphrased/lifted from the jpost. com article but did not read the research article. @Ygggdrasil graciously points out the error in post #3 below. Thanks!

The study found that the antibody in question reacts not only to SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, but also SARS-CoV-1, which causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

https://www.jpost.com/health-science/study-identifies-antibody-from-common-cold-infection-that-reacts-to-covid-669579

Open access research article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23074-3

Cheers,
Tom

 

[.Scott]

Here's some background:

There are 3 Coronavirus infections that were most decidedly not "common":
SARS (2003), MERS (2012), and COVID-19 (2019).

According to this May 2020 NIH Article:

An estimated 20 to 30 per cent of common colds are caused by four coronaviruses

Those four are:
HCoV-OC43
HCoV-HKU1
HCoV-229E
HCoV-NL53

 

[Ygggdrasil]

That's not an accurate summary of the article. The article looked at serum samples collected pre-pandemic and see that none of the samples contain antibodies that cross-react with SARS-CoV-2 even though they contain high titers of antibodies that react with the common cold coronaviruses:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23074-3

Indeed, as the authors note in the paper:

In sera from our pre-pandemic cohort, we found no evidence of pre-existing SARS-CoV-2 S-protein reactive antibodies that resulted from endemic HCoV infections, consistent with other studies41,42.

The broadly cross-reacting antibody identified in the study was isolated from patients who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. The fact that some of the anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies they isolated cross-react with the common cold beta-coronaviruses (HKU1 and OC43) lead them to speculate that these antibodies originated from the maturation of memory B-cells left over previous common cold Coronavirus infections. However, the authors note that this hypothesis is speculative:

In general, it should be noted that although our study provides evidence for a recall of cross-reactive Abs upon SARS-CoV-2 infection, the most definitive demonstration of the origins of cross-reactive Ab responses would come from longitudinal human studies of donors before and after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

So, no, antibodies from the common cold do not react with or protect from COVID-19. Rather, it is possible (but not definitively shown) that memory B-cells from previous common cold infections could provide the source of some antibodies against COVID-19.