Study Offers Good News on COVID-19 Immunity

Pictured from left to right: Yu Chen, Malika Hale and Christopher Thouvenel of the Rawlings lab at Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
For close to a decade the labs of Dr. David Rawlings at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Dr. Marion Pepper at the University of Washington have collaborated on a project studying the immune response in malaria infections.
As the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the U.S., they turned their expertise and the techniques pioneered for malaria to a new line of inquiry: Did mild infection from the new coronavirus stimulate the immune system to generate antibodies that would offer future protection from the virus? And if so, could they engineer those neutralizing antibodies in the lab to develop potent new therapeutic options?
Rawlings, the director of the Center for Immunity and Immunotherapies at Seattle Children’s and a professor of pediatrics at UW, discusses their encouraging findings now published in Cell. Learn why he says their research is good news for efforts to control COVID-19 and what’s next for his lab. Read full post »