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Correspondence: Jens Wrammert, jwramme@emory.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank the participants and parents of infant donors for volunteering their time and efforts to participate in this study. We also thank Christina Rostad and Sanjeev Kumar for critically reviewing the manuscript. The graphical abstract was created using BioRender.com.

Author contributions: D.J. performed data acquisition, data curation and analysis, data visualization, and writing the manuscript. L.E.N. and V.Z. contributed to data curation and analysis, data visualization, and writing review and editing. A.M., K.M., and S.L. contributed to investigation and data curation and analysis. A.R.B. and K.S. provided clinical support and contributed to patient recruitment and clinical data curation. G.M. and C.N. contributed to patient sample collection and paper review. R.A., E.J.A., M.A.S., M.S.S., and J.W. contributed to the conception and design of the study, writing and editing of the manuscript, and obtaining study funding. All authors have read and accepted the manuscript.

Competing interests: M.S.S. has served as an advisor for Ocugen and Moderna. E.J.A. has consulted for Pfizer, Sanofi Pasteur, Janssen, and Medscape, and his institution receives funds to conduct clinical research unrelated to this manuscript from MedImmune, Regeneron, PaxVax, Pfizer, GSK, Merck, Sonfi-Pasteur, Janssen, and Micron. He also serves on data and safety monitoring boards for Kentucky BioProcessing, Inc., and Sanofi Pasteur. His institution has also received funding from NIH to conduct clinical trials of Moderna and Janssen COVID-19 vaccines. M.A.S. received funding from CDC, Pfizer, Merck, and Cepheid to study immune response to respiratory virus infections and vaccinations.

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Research Funding:

This work was supported in part by grants U01AI144673-02, 3U19AI057266-17S2, and U54CA260563 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and by the Oliver S. and Jennie R. Donaldson Charitable Trust, Emory Executive Vice President for Health Affairs Synergy Fund award, the Georgia Research Alliance, the Pediatric Research Alliance Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Emory-UGA Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance (Atlanta, GA USA), and a Woodruff Health Sciences Center 2020 COVID-19 CURE Award.

Keywords:

  • Clinical finding
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • early-life infection
  • Pediatrics

Infants and young children generate more durable antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection than adults

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Journal Title:

iScience

Volume:

Volume 26, Number 10

Publisher:

, Pages 107967-None

Type of Work:

Article | Final Publisher PDF

Abstract:

As SARS-CoV-2 becomes endemic, it is critical to understand immunity following early-life infection. We evaluated humoral responses to SARS-CoV-2 in 23 infants/young children. Antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 spike antigens peaked approximately 30 days after infection and were maintained up to 500 days with little apparent decay. While the magnitude of humoral responses was similar to an adult cohort recovered from mild/moderate COVID-19, both binding and neutralization titers to WT SARS-CoV-2 were more durable in infants/young children, with spike and RBD IgG antibody half-life nearly 4X as long as in adults. IgG subtype analysis revealed that while IgG1 formed the majority of the response in both groups, IgG3 was more common in adults and IgG2 in infants/young children. These findings raise important questions regarding differential regulation of humoral immunity in infants/young children and adults and could have broad implications for the timing of vaccination and booster strategies in this age group.

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© 2023 The Author(s)

This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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