The T cells, along with antibodies, are an integral part of the human immune response against viral infections due to their ability to directly target and kill infected cells.
In a new study, researchers found the presence of virus-specific T cell immunity in people who recovered from COVID-19 and SARS, as well as some healthy study subjects who had never been infected by either virus.
The findings suggest infection and exposure to coronaviruses induces long-lasting memory T cells, which could help in the management of the current pandemic and in vaccine development against COVID-19.
The research was conducted by a team at Duke-NUS Medical School and elsewhere.
In the study, the team tested people who recovered from COVID-19 and found the presence of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells in all of them, which suggests that T cells play an important role in this infection.
Importantly, they showed that patients who recovered from SARS 17 years ago after the 2003 outbreak, still possess virus-specific memory T cells and displayed cross-immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
The team also tested uninfected healthy individuals and found SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells in more than 50 percent of them.
This could be due to cross-reactive immunity obtained from exposure to other coronaviruses, such as those causing the common cold, or presently unknown animal coronaviruses.
It is important to understand if this could explain why some individuals are able to better control the infection.
The researchers also initiated follow-up studies on the COVID-19 recovered patients, to determine if their immunity as shown in their T cells persists over an extended period of time.
This is very important for vaccine development and to answer the question about reinfection.
One author of the study is Professor Antonio Bertoletti from Duke-NUS’ Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) program.
The study is published in Nature.
Copyright © 2020 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
