Once the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus responsible for Covid, passed, it seemed that this pathogen would turn into a cold or another flu because we would all suffer mildly sooner or later. In part, that’s exactly what happened, except everyone will get through that virus.
Four years after the start of the pandemic, there are still people who have not been infected with Covid or have shown no signs of being infected with the virus.
Solve an old doubt. A British team of researchers carried it out A new study So far some have attempted to answer the question of what factors contributed to people being able to avoid Covid. The answer (or one of the answers) may lie in your “unique immune response.”
local response. The team talks about a local immune response in the nasal mucosa. This immune response, which has never been described before, is responsible for protecting many people from the virus. Another newly discovered immune response is linked to our blood’s white blood cells, which are responsible for engulfing and destroying pathogens in our bodies.
Thanks to their study, it was possible to get an idea not only about the cells involved in the immune response, but also about a gene that can play an important role in them.
“These findings will not only have important implications for the development of next-generation interventions for SARS-CoV-2, but they should also be generalizable to future outbreaks and pandemics,” A press release explained Christopher Chew, co-author of the study.
HLA-DQA2. As the team explained, those whose bodies were faster at getting rid of the virus did not show a general immune response like normal, but rather a more “subtle” response locally in the nasal passages. They also found that the most effective responses may be associated with the expression of a gene called HLA-DQA2.
On the other hand, among those who responded to the virus in a more “normal” way, the activation of the immune system in the nasal area was not as active, but its activation in the blood was, that is, its response. White blood cells. .
The “pathway” of the virus. The study involved 36 participants who had no history of the infection, ie, the calls Novids. These participants were inoculated nasally with this virus, step by step, able to observe the evolution of the infection, if it occurred.
It wanted to know the entire “path” of the virus in our body, from inoculation to the moment the pathogen disappears from it. The team used the technique of single-cell sequencing, which allowed the team to create a database with information from a set of 600,000 cells.
Job details published in an article in the magazine the nature.
Atlas of cells. This study won’t directly help us continue to suffer from Covid for years to come or improve the condition of those with long-term infections, but it may help us prevent future epidemics and better understand respiratory infections.
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Picture | Alexandra_Koch