Credit: Jenna Hambrick, La Jolla Institute for Immunology
LA JOLLA--New data suggest that nearly all COVID-19 survivors have the immune cells necessary to fight re-infection.
The findings, based on analyses of blood samples from 188 COVID-19 patients, suggest that responses to the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, from all major players in the "adaptive" immune system, which learns to fight specific pathogens, can last for at least eight months after the onset of symptoms from the initial infection.
"Our data suggest that the immune response is there--and it stays," LJI Professor Alessandro Sette, Dr. Biol. Sci., who co-led the study with LJI Professor Shane Crotty, Ph.D., and LJI Research Assistant Professor Daniela Weiskopf, Ph.D.