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Scientists in Shanghai say some recovered patients show no signs of the neutralising proteins. Researchers in Shanghai hope to determine whether some recovered coronavirus patients have a higher risk of reinfection after finding surprisingly low levels of Covid-19 antibodies in a number of people discharged from hospital. A team from Fudan University analysed blood samples from 175 patients discharged from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre and found that nearly a third had unexpectedly low levels of antibodies. In some cases, antibodies could not be detected at all.
“Whether these patients were at high risk of rebound or reinfection should be explored in further studies,” the team wrote in preliminary research released on Monday on Medrxiv.org, an online platform for preprint papers. Although the study was preliminary and not peer-reviewed, it was the world’s first systematic examination of antibody levels in patients who had recovered from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, the researchers said.
All of the patients had recently recovered from mild symptoms of the disease and most of those with low antibody levels were young. The researchers excluded patients who had been admitted to intensive care units because many of them already had antibodies from donated blood plasma....
Preprint of the original Report in medRxiv (April 6, 2020):
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report about NAbs drawn from the plasma of a COVID-19 recovered patient cohort, potentially providing useful information for passive antibody therapy and vaccine development against SARS-CoV-2 virus. The highly variable levels of NAbs in the patients of COVID-19 indicated that convalescent plasma and serum from recovered donors should be titrated before use in passive antibody therapy, an easy task that can be performed using the PsV neutralization assay.
Correlation of NAbs titers with the age, lymphocyte counts and blood CRP levels of patients also lays the groundwork for further study to explore the mechanism of NAbs development in COVID-19 patients.