Antibodies, B Cell Responses and Immune Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Infections
A special issue of Antibodies (ISSN 2073-4468).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 March 2022) | Viewed by 75925
Special Issue Editors
2. Texas Biomedical Research Institute, San Antonio, TX 78245, USA
Interests: virology; vaccines; antivirals; influenza viruses; arenaviruses; Zika virus; coronavirus; SARS-CoV-2; COVID-19; innate immunity; adaptive immunity; interferon; virus-host interactions
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are enveloped, single-stranded, positive-sense RNA viruses responsible for seasonal mild respiratory illness in humans. They include endemic human CoV NL63, 229E, OC43, and HKU1, which are associated with a small proportion of these mild respiratory illnesses. However, three CoVs are most notable as human respiratory pathogens that have caused significant morbidity and mortality. These are Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoV-1 (SARS-CoV-1), which spread in 2003, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV), appeared in 2012 and still present, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoV-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which is responsible for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). COVID-19 emerged in the city of Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and has now caused a world-wide pandemic, dramatically impacting public health and socioeconomic activities across the world. The explosive emergence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans has resulted in a pandemic of COVID-19 with an alarming case fatality, posing a threat to human health and economy of an unprecedent magnitude, rivaling the “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918–1919. To date, no United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved vaccines and/or specific antivirals are available for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 in humans, which has triggered vast scientific efforts to develop countermeasures to deal with this infection.
Although experimental treatments for COVID-19 infection are being tested clinically, and the development of preventative vaccines is ongoing, there does not yet exist a highly specific, scalable, and sustainable approved therapeutic. Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are a growing class of drugs, in part due to their high degree of specificity, limited off-target effects, and superb safety profile. In addition to their use in the treatment of cancer and autoimmunity, several mAbs are already licensed or in clinical trials for the treatment and prevention of various infectious diseases (e.g., Palivizumab for Respiratory Syncytial Virus and Zmapp for Ebola virus). However, numerous fundamental aspects of the host B cells and antibody response to infection remain to be resolved. Foremost, does infection result in protective humoral immunity? If so, how long is it maintained, and will it be sufficiently broad to protect from emerging antigenic variations in SARS-CoV-2?
In this Special Issue “Antibodies, B Cell Responses and Immune Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Infections", we aim to cover all aspects related to vaccinology, such as traditional and new approaches for COVID-19 vaccine development, vaccine immunogenicity and protection efficacy, classical and new antigen targeting, conserved viral antigens and their epitopes, identification and characterization of SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactive and broadly neutralizing mAbs, including therapeutic and prophylactic mAbs, induction of efficient and protective adaptive B cell responses, correlation of mAb and B cell activation to protection against SARS-CoV-2, and currently available and new animal models of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine testing. This Special Issue will also aim to examine classical and new vaccine methodologies for the control of SARS-CoV-2 infections. We hope that the collection of novel research and review manuscripts in this Special Issue will provide researchers with information on the latest and newest discoveries to help them reach the goal of developing and implementing treatment options for the control of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which is a priority for the treatment of COVID-19.
Prof. Dr. Luis Martinez-Sobrido
Prof. James J. Kobie
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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Keywords
- Antibodies
- B Cell Responses
- Immune Responses
- COVID-19
- SARS-CoV-2 Infections
- mAbs
- Monoclonal antibodies
- vaccine development
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