Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS

Rogue antibodies involved in almost one-fifth of COVID deaths

The self-targeting antibodies attack type 1 interferons that play a key role in fighting infection.
  1. Diana Kwon
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

Medical workers in protective equipment take care of a COVID-19 patient on a ventilator at Yokohama City Seibu Hospital.

Physicians treat a person with COVID-19 at a hospital in Japan.Credit: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty

Antibodies that turn against elements of our own immune defences are a key driver of severe illness and death following SARS-CoV-2 infection in some people, according to a large international study. These rogue antibodies, known as autoantibodies, are also present in a small proportion of healthy, uninfected individuals — and their prevalence increases with age, which may help to explain why elderly people are at higher risk of severe COVID-19.

The findings, published on 19 August in Science Immunology1, provide robust evidence to support an observation made by the same research team last October. Led by immunologist Jean-Laurent Casanova at the Rockefeller University in New York City, the researchers found that around 10% of people with severe COVID-19 had autoantibodies that attack and block type 1 interferons, protein molecules in the blood that have a critical role in fighting off viral infections2.

“The initial report from last year was probably one of the most important papers in the pandemic,” says Aaron Ring, an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in this work. “What they’ve done in this new study is really dig down to see just how common these antibodies are across the general population — and it turns out they’re astonishingly prevalent.”

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 597, 162 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02337-5

References

  1. Bastard, P. et al. Science Immunol. 6, eabl4340 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Bastard, P. et al. Science 370, eabd4585 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Asano, T. et al. Science Immunol. 6, eabl4348 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Zhang, Q. et al. Science 370, eabd4570 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Wang, E. Y. et al. Nature 595, 283–288 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links