Chat message
Slack / Private Message Drop, p.447 [SLACK_000661] · slack_pm:msg:04622
Page text: p.447 · original PDF
- Date
- 2021-01-24 07:06
- Type
- chat message · slack
- recipient
- Kristian G. Andersen, Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut
- speaker
- Robert F. Garry
Recipients on this medium are inferred from channel membership, not per-message addressing.
If you are still with me - the main point I want to make is that our Tulane immunosuppressed patient had zero
antibodies to SC2 spike and nucleoprotein to date. Zilch. Rituximab plus Bendamustine - very low WBC.
Unfortunately we don't have antibody data on the NEJM patients, but we do know that the first NEJM patient above was blasted with Rituximab and high dose steroids. We're going to try and measure T cell responses in the Tulane patient, but not expecting much. Bottom lines: 1. some immunosuppressed patients may have just by chance been infected with variants arising in their communities OR the variants came up *really* fast. 2. immunosuppressed patients can select for variants over time -months , but the population dynamics are complex. 3. immune escape perhaps less important than fitness as a selective pressure in immunosuppressed patients - some of the fitter variants just happen to be in epitopes.4. By whatever mechanism a LOT of the same mutations appear via independent events in these immunosuppressed patients.