Determination of neutralising anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody half-life in COVID-19 convalescent donors
Thomas W. Barnes, Johannes Schulte-Pelkum, Laura Steller, Daniel Filchtinski, Robin Jenness, Michelle R. Williams, Christina Kober, Sandro Manni, Thomas Häuser, Aaron Hahn, Uwe Kalina, Toby L. Simon, Patrick Schuetz, Nathan Roth
Abstract
Despite the burgeoning field of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) research, the persistence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) neutralising antibodies remains unclear. This study validated two high-throughput immunological methods for use as surrogate live virus neutralisation assays and employed them to examine the half-life of SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibodies in convalescent plasma donations made by 42 repeat donors between April and September 2020. SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibody titres decreased over time but typically remained above the methods' diagnostic cut-offs. Using this longitudinal data, the average half-life of SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibodies was determined to be 20.4 days. SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibody titres appear to persist in the majority of donors for several months. Whether these titres confer protection against re-infection requires further study and is of particular relevance as COVID-19 vaccines become widely available.