Conquering COVID-19: Understanding and maintaining immunity to COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on health and society globally. It also represented a time of unprecedented international scientific investigation and collaboration. The research efforts towards combating COVID-19 generated enormous amounts of high-quality data on the virus, how it transmits, infects and makes people sick. Additionally, there has been in depth investigation into how our immune system responds to infection and vaccination. Meaningful integration of this data is of critical importance to understand how our immune system protects us from clinical illness, how long that protection will last, and how to best protect people against the constant emergence of new variants.
The Infection Analytics Program's research has influenced policy guidance and will continue to help inform how to effectively protect different populations, such as the immunosuppressed, from severe COVID-19 as well as how to improve immunity to novel COVID-19 variants. To improve the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of immunity, the team has performed a number of reviews of the research literature, in addition to analysis of experimental and clinical data on COVID-19 immunity and vaccine protection.
We use a combination of data from systematic reviews of the literature, and from experimental and clinical collaborators. We integrate this data with mathematical and statistical approaches to define and explore immune correlates of protection.
To date, the approaches of integrating data from immunological and clinical investigations of COVID-19 have enabled us to define the first correlate of protection for COVID-19, provide the first estimates of changes in vaccine efficacy to novel COVID-19 variants and indicate the likely clinical effectiveness of the latest COVID-19 boosters. Our unique approach has also allowed us to uncover that neutralising antibodies (which stop virus infecting human cells) are not only a correlate of protection against COVID-19 but also directly mediate protection.
By identifying and validating neutralising antibodies as a correlate of immunity in COVID-19, this work has been cited in over 150 policy documents globally (including the FDA, WHO, and ATAGI). This work has directly supported regulatory decisions on the licensure of new vaccines and antibody therapies for COVID-19 and has helped guide booster vaccine policy.
- Stephen Kent
- Jen Juno
- Adam Wheatley
- Sarah Sasson
- Katherine Kedzierska
- Tari Turner
- Mark Polizzotto
- Jamie Triccas
- Megan Steain
