December 9, 2021
As Covid-19 began spreading in early 2020, one of Linfa Wang’s first ideas was to test the blood of people who’d survived a previous coronavirus outbreak. The virologist, who works out of Duke-NUS Medical School, a collaboration between Duke and the National University of Singapore, has been studying bat-borne viruses for decades. He’d helped show that SARS-CoV-1, which killed almost 800 people in 2003, likely jumped to humans from horseshoe bats. Wang’s new theory was that people who’d recovered from the original SARS might harbor antibodies that could help fight the new one, SARS-CoV-2.
Initially, the experiment was a bust. The patients Wang tested had antibodies only against the older version of SARS. But as a number of Covid variants began spreading early this year, he decided to test the patients again. By this point, many of the Singaporean SARS survivors had also been vaccinated against Covid, providing a rare set of immune systems that had been exposed to proteins from these related coronaviruses.
Read more at Bloomberg News.