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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2022.07.09.499414

Landscape of infection enhancing antibodies in COVID-19 and healthy donors

Ismanto, H. S.·Xu, Z.·Saputri, D. S.·Wilamowski, J.·Li, S.·Nugraha, D. K.·Horiguchi, Y.·Okada, M.·Arase, H.·Standley, D. M.
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Abstract

To assess the frequency of SARS-CoV-2 infection enhancing antibodies in the general population, we searched over 64 million heavy chain antibody sequences from healthy and COVID-19 patient repertoires for sequences similar to 11 previously reported enhancing antibodies. Although the distribution of sequence identities was similar in COVID-19 and healthy repertoires, the COVID-19 hits were significantly more clonally expanded than healthy hits. Furthermore, among the tested hits, 17 out of 94 from COVID-19, compared with 2 out of 96 from healthy, bound to the enhancing epitope. A total of 6 of the 19 epitope-binding antibodies enhanced ACE2 receptor binding to the spike protein. Together, this study revealed that enhancing antibodies are far more frequent in COVID-19 patients than in healthy donors, but a reservoir of potential enhancing antibodies exists in healthy donors that could potentially mature to actual enhancing antibodies upon infection.

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Ismanto, H. S., Xu, Z., Saputri, D. S., Wilamowski, J., Li, S., Nugraha, D. K., Horiguchi, Y., Okada, M., Arase, H., Standley, D. M.. 2022-07-11. Landscape of infection enhancing antibodies in COVID-19 and healthy donors. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.09.499414

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