In a letter published in Gut, Drs. Genelle Healey, Bruce Vallance and CITF-funded researcher Dr. Pascal Lavoie (University of British Columbia) and their team identified a link between the composition of one’s gut microbiota and COVID-19 vaccine-induced immunity.
A CITF-funded study published in PLoS One, led by Drs. Marc-André Langlois and Allyson MacLean (University of Ottawa), demonstrated that agroinfiltration, a method to generate proteins in plants, could be used to produce the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
In a study partially funded by the CITF and published in Cell Reports, Drs. Andrés Finzi (Université de Montréal) and Renée Bazin (Héma-Québec) showed that a third vaccine dose elicited strong antibody responses regardless of the interval between the first and second doses.
A paper published in NPJ Vaccines by CITF-funded researcher Dr. Michael Grant (Memorial University of Newfoundland) shows that, in a group of individuals who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the immune response induced by the subsequent rounds of vaccination was stronger when the COVID-19 symptoms were more severe.
Live viral neutralizing antibody titers are widely accepted as a good measure of immunity, yet conducting the assays are time-consuming and laborious making them suboptimal for population level measurements.
A new study, published in Microbiology Spectrum from the CITF-funded Canadian Blood Services (CBS) team led by Drs. Sheila O’Brien and Steven Drews, characterizes the ability of a new immunoassay to specify the concentration of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in blood plasma.
Convalescent plasma therapy (CPT), which entails using plasma containing anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies taken from recovered individuals, has achieved mixed results in treating aged or immunosuppressed individuals suffering from severe COVID-19.
The HostSeq platform, established in April 2020, is a national collaboration of population-based studies investigating the genetic risk factors behind SARS-CoV-2 infection and health outcomes associated with it.
Published in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, this CITF-funded study led by Dr. Marc-André Langlois, along with Malaa Bhatt, Roger Zemek (University of Ottawa) found that approximately 1 in 8 individuals with COVID-19 did not develop antibodies detectable in blood serum (a process known as seroconversion) as a result of infection.
While two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine can prevent serious illness in most cases, vaccine-induced immune responses decline naturally over time, increasing the risk of breakthrough infections.