[Nature] Potent neutralizing antibodies directed to multiple epitopes on SARS-CoV-2 spike

Nature, 22 July 2020

Lihong Liu, Pengfei Wang, Manoj S. Nair, Jian Yu, Micah Rapp, Qian Wang, Yang Luo, Jasper F-W. Chan, Vincent Sahi, Amir Figueroa, Xinzheng V. Guo, Gabriele Cerutti, Jude Bimela, Jason Gorman, Tongqing Zhou, Zhiwei Chen, Kwok-Yung Yuen, Peter D. Kwong, Joseph G. Sodroski, Michael T. Yin, Zizhang Sheng, Yaoxing Huang, Lawrence Shapiro & David D. Ho

Highlights:

• Isolation of 61 SARS-CoV-2-neutralizing monoclonal antibodies from 5 infected patients hospitalized with severe disease.
• Among these are 19 antibodies that potently neutralized the authentic SARS-CoV-2 in vitro, 9 of which exhibited exquisite potency, with 50% virus-inhibitory concentrations of 0.7 to 9 ng/mL.
• Epitope mapping showed this collection of 19 antibodies to be about equally divided between those directed to the receptor-binding domain (RBD) and those to the N-terminal domain (NTD), indicating that both of these regions at the top of the viral spike are immunogenic.
• Several of these monoclonal antibodies are promising candidates for clinical development as potential therapeutic and/or prophylactic agents against SARS-CoV-2.

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