Anderson EM, Goodwin EC, Verma A, Arevalo CP, Bolton MJ, Weirick ME, Gouma S, McAllister CM, Christensen SR, Weaver J, Hicks P, Manzoni TB, Oniyide O, Ramage H, Mathew D, Baxter AE, Oldridge DA, Greenplate AR, Wu JE, Alanio C, D’Andrea K, Kuthuru O, Dougherty J, Pattekar A, Kim J, Han N, Apostolidis SA, Huang AC, Vella LA, Kuri-Cervantes L, Pampena MB; UPenn COVID Processing Unit; Betts MR, Wherry EJ, Meyer NJ, Cherry S, Bates P, Rader DJ, Hensley SE. Seasonal human coronavirus antibodies are boosted upon SARS-CoV-2 infection but not associated with protection. Cell. 2021 Apr 1;184(7):1858-1864.e10. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.02.010. Epub 2021 Feb 9. PMID: 33631096; PMCID: PMC7871851.
Abstract
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has rapidly spread within the human population. Although SARS-CoV-2 is a novel coronavirus, most humans had been previously exposed to other antigenically distinct common seasonal human coronaviruses (hCoVs) before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Here, we quantified levels of SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies and hCoV-reactive antibodies in serum samples collected from 431 humans before the COVID-19 pandemic. We then quantified pre-pandemic antibody levels in serum from a separate cohort of 251 individuals who became PCR-confirmed infected with SARS-CoV-2. Finally, we longitudinally measured hCoV and SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the serum of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Our studies indicate that most individuals possessed hCoV-reactive antibodies before the COVID-19 pandemic. We determined that ∼20% of these individuals possessed non-neutralizing antibodies that cross-reacted with SARS-CoV-2 spike and nucleocapsid proteins. These antibodies were not associated with protection against SARS-CoV-2 infections or hospitalizations, but they were boosted upon SARS-CoV-2 infection.