Many people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 will probably make antibodies against the virus for most of their lives. So suggest researchers who have identified long-lived antibody-producing cells in the bone marrow of people who have recovered from COVID-191.
The study provides evidence that immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection will be extraordinarily long-lasting. Adding to the good news, “the implications are that vaccines will have the same durable effect”, says Menno van Zelm, an immunologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Antibodies — proteins that can recognize and help to inactivate viral particles — are a key immune defence. After a new infection, short-lived cells called plasmablasts are an early source of antibodies.
But these cells recede soon after a virus is cleared from the body, and other, longer-lasting cells make antibodies: memory B cells patrol the blood for reinfection, while bone marrow plasma cells (BMPCs) hide away in bones, trickling out antibodies for decades.
“A plasma cell is our life history, in terms of the pathogens we’ve been exposed to,” says Ali Ellebedy, a B-cell immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who led the study, published in Nature on 24 May.
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01442-9
Updates & Corrections
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Correction 27 May 2021: An earlier version of this article gave the wrong number of bone-marrow samples. This has now been corrected.
References
Turner, J. S. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03647-4 (2021).
Kaneko, N. et al. Cell 183, 143–157 (2020).
Long, Q.-X. et al. Nature Med. 26, 1200–1204 (2020).
Ellebedy, A. et al. Preprint at Research Square https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-310773/v1 (2021).

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