The patient had a lymphoma and had been successfully treated with CAR-T cell therapy, 3 years earlier. It took her over a year to clear covid from her system and during that time the scientists learnt a lot about how the virus evolves.
"In this patient, the virus developed mutations that are hallmarks of the Alpha, Gamma, and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2, none of which had yet taken hold in the general population. Immune-suppressed patients “give you a window on how the virus explores the genetic space,”"
Thankfully, chronic COVID-19 infections appear relatively rare, doctors say, but they are also important to study. “New variants are still a threat,” says Ravindra Gupta, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Cambridge, and “chronic infection is what drives” at least some of them.
Work by Gupta suggests the Alpha variant, which surged in the United Kingdom in December 2020 before spreading elsewhere, may have first appeared in an immune-compromised individual.
Furthermore, Gupta and his team reported, convalescent plasma that patient received, which is rich in antibodies, appeared to drive viral evolution. Nussenblatt’s patient received convalescent plasma as well, both when she first got sick and this spring, when her symptoms worsened again. Happily the patient eventually cleared the virus and is well again .
More here: science.org/content/article...
(image is of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (green) attacking a patient’s cell (purple).)
Jackie
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