New Paper (Other): Persistence and Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in an Immunocompromised Host

[marouenbg]

Title: Persistence and Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in an Immunocompromised Host

General Information

Please paste a link to the paper or a citation here:

Link: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2031364

What is the paper's Manubot-style citation?

Citation: @doi:10.1056/NEJMc2031364

Is this paper primarily relevant to Background or Pathogenesis?

• [ ] Background
• [x] Pathogenesis
• [ ] Methods

Please list some keywords (3-10) that help identify the relevance of this paper to COVID-19

• keyword 1 SARS-CoV-2
• keyword 2 immunodeficiency
• keyword 3 convalescent plasma

Please note the publication / review status

• [ ] Pre-print
• [x] New Peer-Reviewed Paper
• [ ] Peer-Reviewed Paper Pre-2020

Which areas of expertise are particularly relevant to the paper?

• [x] virology
• [ ] epidemiology
• [ ] biostatistics
• [ ] immunology
• [ ] pharmacology
• [ ] other:

[marouenbg]

Summary

Suggested questions to answer about each paper:

• What did they analyze? Similar to #773 , this is a report of a single case of an immunodeficient 45 year old patient. The authors analyzed the genomic variability of the nasopharyngeal swabs across time.

• What methods did they use? Sequence analysis of nasopharyngeal swabs.

• Does this paper study COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, or a related disease and/or virus? This paper informs about the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in immunodepressed patients that were exposed to antibody treatment. The duration of positivity of the patient (more than 100 days) while presenting symptoms (as opposed to #773) and remaining infectious (in agreement with #773) suggests that immunodeficiency favors the evolution of the virus,.

• What is the main finding (or a few main takeaways)? The interesting observation in this single case study was that the patient was given the Regeneron antibody cocktail (while #773 was given convalescent plasma), which suggests that selection pressure could be developed in immunodeficiency to select for potent variants.

• What does this paper tell us about the background and/or diagnostics/therapeutics for COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2? Similar to #773, the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 seem driven by selection pressure in immunodeficient patients. This observation could have dramatic consequences on vaccine design and could promote the development of second generation vaccines.

• Do you have any concerns about methodology or the interpretation of these results beyond this analysis? None

Any comments or notes?