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Florian Krammer Profile picture
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7 Feb, 5 tweets, 2 min read
1) Es geht hier nicht nur um Tirol. Es waere sehr wichtig B.1.351 (und in Zukunft aehnliche Varianten, speziell welche mit der E484K Mutation) schnell zu finden (aka alles Sequenzieren, und zwar innerhalb von Stunden, nicht Tagen)....
2)..., lokal zu Tracen und wenn noetig lokale Massnahmen zu treffen. Und zwar ohne politische Reibereien. Daten und Sequenzen muessen ohne Barrieren zwischen Bund und Laendern geteilt werden. Contact Tracing von Faellen muss schnell und reibungslos funktionieren.
3) Es geht ja nicht darum, ein Bundesland zu bestrafen, sondern darum solche Varianten schnell unter Kontrolle zu bringen. Vielleicht sollte man ein paar mobile Sequenzierlabors einrichten die man vor Ort schicken kann. Ich mein, ein MinION braucht recht wenig Platz.
4) Ich wuerde mir wuenschen, Oesterreich wuerde da eine Vorreiterrolle in Europa einnehmen. Gute Leute wie @Bergthalerlab haben wir ja die das leiten koennten und auch in den Bundeslaendern gibts exzellente Expertise. Dann koennte man sich das Drama ersparen.
5) Und fuer die Steiermark gilt genau das gleiche. Sofort handeln, transparent arbeiten und das Problem loesen. steiermark.orf.at/stories/308908…

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More from @florian_krammer

Florian Krammer Profile picture
29 Jan
1) The low efficacy of the Novavax vaccine candidate against the B.1.351 is concerning. However, the data is also reassuring in many ways. First, the vaccine itself worked very well against the 'old' SARS-CoV-2 variants and the B.1.1.7 (UK) variant. Also, the vaccine...
2) ...seems to work almost as well in HIV positive individuals as in HIV negative individuals. And, vaccine efficacy against B.1.351 seemed markedly reduced, but still present. This was against symptomatic disease in general. It is very likely, that the efficacy against....
3)...severe disease is much higher. There are also some other things we can learn here. Novavax was reporting very high neutralization titers from their initial clinical phases, around 1:3500. Now, we see that there is a reduction in neutralization against B.1.351....
Read 11 tweets
Florian Krammer Profile picture
26 Jan
1) So, this morning I promised a little tweetorial about variants and here we go. This will be from a vaccine/antibody point of view only, I won't comment on how infectious they are or if they are more pathogenic (I'll leave that to Boris Johnson 😉).
2) There are currently two variants for which there are insightful data sets. One is B.1.1.7 (aka the British variant) and the other one is B.1.351 (aka the South African variant). Let's start with B.1.1.7, which is easier. There is also more data. B.1.1.7 has a number of....
3)....mutations. Two are of special concern when it comes to vaccines since they might influence neutralizing epitopes. One is a change in position 501 (N501Y). This is located in the receptor binding domain of the virus were a lot of neutralizing antibodies bind. The other....
Read 44 tweets
Florian Krammer Profile picture
5 Jan
1) We just put a really nice new preprint online about the HA and NA of the Wuhan spiny eel virus, a sister virus to influenza B that was discovered among many other new RNA viruses by RNA seq in 2016 by @edwardcholmes and colleagues (nature.com/articles/natur…).
2) Based on the sequences @Guha_Arunkumar and @Shirin_Strohm expressed the HA and NA recombinantly in the lab. @Guha_Arunkumar then nicely characterized them. It turns out - and this was done with the help of @RobertPdeVries1 and colleagues - that the HA binds very specifically..
3)...to a ganglioside (GM2) but not to regular glycans with terminal sialic acid. Very special! The NA turned out to be very similar in activity and specificity to influenza B virus NA.
Read 5 tweets
Florian Krammer Profile picture
3 Jan
1) If we want to generate difficult viral escape mutants in the lab (e.g. for epitope mapping), we subject the virus to low antibody pressure and then slowly move up. A little bit like after one vaccine dose. I think it would be good to give the second dose as soon as possible.
2) I don't know if 12 weeks is going to be a huge issue, but that time frame should be minimized as much as possible. Also, there are good reasons for giving the second dose. It is likely that the second dose is needed to generate long lived and strong immunity.
3) But it will likely also drive affinity maturation of antibodies. This will make the antibodies stronger, and potentially will allow them to better cope with new variants.
Read 4 tweets
Florian Krammer Profile picture
22 Dec 20
1) The biggest worry for vaccines about the new UK variant is the N501Y mutation in the receptor binding domain. This is also a mutation that appears when SARS-CoV-2 is mouse adapted. A paper looking at that found....
2)...that an experimental RBD-based vaccine still worked. I am not 100% sure the vaccine was based on N501, but I assume so. That would already be some good news. In general, I am not to worried about the impact of the new variant on vaccines. science.sciencemag.org/content/369/65…
3) The other thing to keep in mind is, that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines protected after one shot, when neutralizing antibodies were super low in the vaccinees, meaning that likely a low titer is sufficient for protection. Titers are very high after the second shot.....
Read 5 tweets
Florian Krammer Profile picture
9 Nov 20
1) This morning, I shared an enthusiastic tweet about Pfizer's interim results with their COVID-19 vaccine. Let me explain here why am I am so enthusiastic, how the road to get this to people might look like and why we still need to control the pandemic NOW.
2) First, the results from the Phase III trial have to be seen in the context of pre-clinical, Phase I and Phase II trials. Preclinically, Pfizer shows the vaccine works in NHPs. Similar vaccines also worked. Also, in early clinical trials their vaccine induced good.....
3)....neutralizing antibody responses (that's what this vaccine does well). Now, in addition to that we get interim efficacy results that are in the 90% range. 90% is pretty good. It might even be higher. Could also be lower. But right now even a vaccine that affords.....
Read 16 tweets

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