I want to tell you about a paper we published this month which is our most in-depth work on persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections in immunosuppressed people with advanced HIV disease. We focused on how it is eventually cleared.
In our cohort we followed people after SARS-CoV-2 infection in Durban, South Africa, including people immunosuppressed because of advanced HIV disease who had delayed adherence to antiretroviral therapy to suppress HIV. We found this group had much longer SARS-CoV-2 infections:
Investigating five advanced HIV disease participants in depth, we observed that these persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections led to extensive SARS-CoV-2 evolution measured in terms of accumulated mutations:
Eventually, all five participants adhered to antiretroviral therapy and controlled their HIV infection. As they did this, they cleared their SARS-CoV-2 infection. The immune response which most closely associated with clearance was the appearance of neutralizing antibodies:
In the previous figure, top row showed the course of SARS-CoV-2 infection in each participants, which lasted for between 130 to 293 days. Bottom row shows the measured neutralization capacity at different timepoints per participant against virus isolated from each participant.
Through a close collaboration, Wendy Burgers and Catherine Riou at University of Cape Town checked whether clearance was associated with T cell responses. There were too few CD4 T cells to test, but enough CD8 T cells (bottom population below). These did not appear at clearance:
Bottom line, in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections, neutralizing antibodies are likely key to clearance.
This likely applies when a pandemic and high HIV prevalence intersect. With low ART adherence, you will get evolution, and perhaps adaptation, of the pandemic virus.
I want to thank the lead author @farinakarim, @KhadijaKhan24, @LustigGil, @Zesuliwe_Jule and all the laboratory and clinical team, T cell collaborators Catherine Riou and Wendy Burgers, and @PennyMo70026063, @rjlessells, @Tuliodna, and especially our partner Yunus Moosa
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We tested live Omicron BA.2.86 subvariant isolated from a South African swab. As you'll see below, it was lurking somewhere for over a year, then started to spread rather slowly, maybe because it evolved similar immune escape to what is circulating now, but no better.
Here are representative results of sera from vaccinated people with breakthrough Omicron infection (subvariants BA.1, BA.4/5, and XBB family) from what we found:
We didn't find large differences in how these viruses replicated either. Similar size of infection foci after 20 hours (top) and cytopathic effect after 72 hours of infection (bottom) relative to XBB.1.5.
We looked at whether #SARSCoV2 attenuates after extensive evolution in an immunosuppressed individual.
Submitted to medRxiv and available on sigallab.net while it gets screened. Bottom line is no.
It evolved to cause more cell death and cell fusion.
Starting with Omicron BA.1, there was a drop in severe disease because of increasing immunity and changes to the virus itself which decrease lower respiratory tract infection. The hope is that because the virus evolved extensively, it became milder, better adapted to us.
We tested the hypothesis that extensive evolution attenuates SARS-CoV-2 by checking viruses from a long-term infection from a person with immunosuppression because of advanced HIV disease.
We made movies of cellular infection, and this is what it looks like with no infection:
This took awhile given that as far as I know we were first to isolate the BA.4 and BA.5 live viruses and submitted the preprint to medRxiv in April. What was not liked by reviewers was the heterogeneity of our BA.1 infected cohort:
1) Most were unvaccinated (24 people) 2) The vaccinated group was split between those with J&J and Pfizer (8 Pfizer, 7 J&J) 3) We included 14 people living with HIV (13 with suppressed HIV viremia) out of 39 total BA.1 infected participants
Given the BA.4/BA.5 #Omicron sub-lineage wave currently happening in South Africa, I wanted to summarize a commentary we published a few weeks ago looking at disease severity in the Omicron BA.1 versus Delta variant waves:
Its important to do this now because disease severity is critical to understand the current BA.4/BA.5 wave in South Africa: while there seems a lot of infection in the community, this is not reflected in hospital admissions, or a great deal of testing for that matter.
I want to let you know that we have a paper out as accelerated article preview in Nature about how vaccination combined with #Omicron/BA.1 infection hybrid immunity enhanced the neutralizing immune response to other variants, including BA.2:
This is an expanded analysis relative to the preprint, which didn't contain the BA.2 neutralization data. The bottom line: if you get infected despite being vaccinated, the vaccine is still working for you. It gives you an advantage in neutralizing other variants (old or new)
The smallest immunity gap is for Omicron BA.1 itself, which was the infecting variant. The gaps get progressively larger, and are 10-fold or higher for Beta, Delta and ancestral virus. However, people who were vaccinated and then Omicron BA.1 infected have better BA.2 immunity.
We measured immunity against the #Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 variants by people infected with the original (BA.1) Omicron sub-lineage. Results consistent with these variants forming next infection wave.
Manuscript submitted to medRxiv and available here:
@KhadijaKhan24 in the Sigallab isolated the live Omicron sub-lineage BA.4 and BA.5 viruses and the first thing we tested was whether they escape neutralizing immunity from previous infection in the massive Omicron sub-lineage BA.1 infection wave which happened a few months ago.
We tested immunity in people infected in BA.1 who were unvaccinated (n=24), and in people previously vaccinated with Pfizer or J&J with breakthrough BA.1 infection: