(original title: new coronavirus findings bring hope for long-term immunity)

According to foreign media reports, the new coronavirus will continue to exist - who released the news earlier this week, which echoed Dr. Fudge's view that "the possibility of eradicating sars-cov-2 is very small" in the United States. In other words, novel coronavirus pneumonia is expected to become an epidemic disease. This is a new infectious disease. People must learn how to deal with it.

Although the global novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic has made great progress in the past few months, there is no cure yet. Doctors have tried several treatments and seen promising results in the study. Now researchers are working on a new drug to prevent complications of the new coronavirus.

All of these efforts will help us treat diseases more effectively than before, and hopefully reduce the risk of death. Of course, the ultimate goal of this campaign is to vaccinate the world. If the vaccine works, the process may take years. Once most people are immunized by direct contact with the new coronavirus or vaccination, they will be able to achieve the group immunity that everyone has been hearing.

So how good can this immunity be? Some new research suggests that people may have long-term immunity.

It is understood that the virus has been in human body for about six months, but this is still not enough to measure the immunity caused by infection. If immunization lasts only a few years, the vaccine can only provide limited protection, which means that people must develop new vaccines in the future. On the other hand, long-term immunity means that one vaccination can play a long-term protective role.

To this end, researchers have begun to study a special type of cells that can be immune for a long time. They are killer T cells that target infected cells and destroy them.

Two groups have been able to prove that if infected people have T cells that target the virus, they can help them recover. In addition, some patients who are not infected with sars-cov-2 may already have T-cell protection from one of the four other human coronaviruses we already know.

Immunologists at La Jolla Institute of immunology published a study in the journal Cell. The study says the novel coronavirus pneumonia survivors carry T helper cells (CD4), which recognize the SARS-CoV-2 protein that binds the virus to human cells and penetrates into it. It is understood that helper T cells activate B cells, which then produce antibodies. But they also have T cells that respond to other sars-cov-2 proteins. 70% of convalescent patients also had virus-specific killer T cells (CD8).

The team also noted that half of the blood samples collected between 2015 and 2018 contained helper T cells that detected the sars-cov-2 virus.

In addition, the research report published by the University Hospital of Charlotte in medrxiv in the form of pre peer review also depicts a similar picture. Andreas Thiel and his team found that 15 of the 18 patients they observed identified T cells targeted at spike protein. Then they analyzed the blood of 68 uninfected people and found that 34% of them had T cells that could recognize sars-cov-2.

Researchers believe that human coronaviruses that have been milder in the past may induce a strong immune response to the new coronavirus, which also plays a role in the new virus.

Although these early results are promising, more research is needed. It is not clear how long the immunization will last and whether it is likely to be reinfected in the future. Steven Varga, an immunologist at the University of Iowa, said: "one reason most people may be able to deal with this virus is that we may have some residual immunity after exposure to the common cold virus."

"These papers are really helpful because they started to define the T cell components of immune responses," virologist Angela Rasmussen of Columbia University told sciencemag that a strong immune response "augurs well for long-term protective immune development."

Source: cnBeta