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T cells found in healthy people before pandemic may help fight coronavirus, study says
- US researchers find helper and killer immune cells that can target the virus in samples from volunteers taken from 2015 to 2018
- They are likely to have had mild flu-like symptoms in the past caused by other strains, according to the scientists
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Some people in the United States were carrying immune cells that could recognise or attack the new virus strain as far back as five years ago, likely after being infected with other coronaviruses, according to a new study.
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Alessandro Sette and a team at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, California found both helper and killer T cells – that can target the virus – in healthy volunteers.
But the volunteers could not have been exposed to the new strain, according to the researchers, as their samples were collected between 2015 and 2018 – well before the first cases were reported in central China in December.
“Understanding adaptive immunity to Sars-CoV-2 is important for vaccine development, interpreting coronavirus disease 2019 pathogenesis, and calibration of pandemic control measures,” Sette wrote in a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Cell on Friday, using the clinical name for the coronavirus.
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Scientists have been puzzled over why many people with the virus only have mild symptoms – some are not even aware they are ill – and immune response is suspected to play a role.
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