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The tests also confirm what other teams of researchers have found: the vaccines are likely to protect people against both the variant first seen in Britain and known as B.1.1.7, and the one first recorded in South Africa and called B.1.135. However, mutations in B.1.135 allow the virus to evade immune responses a bit more, the team, led by Dr. David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University, reported in a pre-report. -printed – a not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“As expected, the virus continues to mutate, and these data show the continued ability of REGEN-COV to neutralize emerging strains, thus validating our multi-antibody cocktail approach against infectious diseases,” said the president of Regeneron, Dr. George Yancopoulos, in a statement. .
“With two complementary antibodies in a therapy, even if one of them has a reduced potency, the risk of losing the effectiveness of the cocktail is considerably reduced, because the virus would need to mutate in several distinct places to escape both. antibody.
Mutations in B.1.1.7 had small effects, if any. But one mutation in particular, in B.1.135, reduced the effectiveness of the immune response in convalescent plasma, in both vaccines, of one of the antibodies to Regeneron and the antibody to Lilly, they said. .
The same mutation is found in a variant observed for the first time in Brazil.
“Mutationally, this virus is moving in a direction that could ultimately lead to our current therapeutic and prophylactic interventions aimed at the viral peak being evaded,” Ho’s team wrote.
“If the rampant spread of the virus continues and more critical mutations accumulate, then we may be doomed to continually pursue the course of SARS-CoV-2, as we have long done with the influenza.”
This means the world needs to vaccinate people faster and, in the meantime, double down on measures to stop the spread of the virus, such as the use of masks, they said.
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