Humoral Immune Responses in Patients with Severe COVID-19: A Comparative Pilot Study between Individuals Infected by SARS-CoV-2 during the Wild-Type and the Delta Periods

Abstract

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, humanity has experienced the spread and circulation of several SARS-CoV-2 variants that differed in transmissibility, contagiousness, and the ability to escape from vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies. However, issues related to the differences in the variant-specific immune responses remain insufficiently studied. The aim of this study was to compare the parameters of the humoral immune responses in two groups of patients with acute COVID-19 who were infected during the circulation period of the D614G and the Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2. Sera from 48 patients with acute COVID-19 were tested for SARS-CoV-2 binding and neutralizing antibodies using six assays. We found that serum samples from the D614G period demonstrated 3.9- and 1.6-fold increases in RBD- and spike-specific IgG binding with wild-type antigens compared with Delta variant antigens (p < 0.01). Cluster analysis showed the existence of two well-separated clusters. The first cluster mainly consisted of D614G-period patients and the second cluster predominantly included patients from the Delta period. The results thus obtained indicate that humoral immune responses in D614G- and Delta-specific infections can be characterized by variant-specific signatures. This can be taken into account when developing new variant-specific vaccines.

Keywords

• SARS-CoV-2
• COVID-19
• variants of concern
• virus neutralization