Clin Immunol . Determination of neutralising anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody half-life in COVID-19 convalescent donors

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Clin Immunol


. 2021 Oct 4;108871.
doi: 10.1016/j.clim.2021.108871. Online ahead of print.
Determination of neutralising anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody half-life in COVID-19 convalescent donors


Thomas W Barnes ¹ , Johannes Schulte-Pelkum ² , Laura Steller ² , Daniel Filchtinski ² , Robin Jenness ³ , Michelle R Williams ³ , Christina Kober ³ , Sandro Manni ¹ , Thomas Hauser ¹ , Aaron Hahn ⁴ , Uwe Kalina ⁴ , Toby L Simon ⁵ , Patrick Schuetz ⁶ , Nathan J Roth ¹



Affiliations

• PMID: 34619377
• DOI: 10.1016/j.clim.2021.108871

Abstract

Despite the burgeoning field of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) research, the persistence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) neutralising antibodies remains unclear. This study validated two high-throughput immunological methods for use as surrogate live virus neutralisation assays and employed them to examine the half-life of SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibodies in convalescent plasma donations made by 42 repeat donors between April and September 2020. SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibody titres decreased over time but typically remained above the methods' diagnostic cut-offs. Using this longitudinal data, the average half-life of SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibodies was determined to be 20.4 days. SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibody titres appear to persist in the majority of donors for several months. Whether these titres confer protection against re-infection requires further study and is of particular relevance as COVID-19 vaccines become widely available.

Keywords: COVID-19; Convalescent donor; Half-life; Neutralising antibodies; SARS-CoV-2.