Scientists at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf conducted a study on how our body fights the virus that causes COVID-19. They found that T cells in our immune system can recognize and respond to a protein in the virus. This protein is called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. They looked at blood samples from COVID-19 patients and people who never had the virus.
What’s interesting is that even people who never had COVID-19 had T cells that reacted to the virus protein. This suggests that their immune cells were activated by other similar viruses that cause the common cold, and this reaction showed up in the tests.
These findings show that our immune response to the COVID-19 virus is more complicated than we thought. Most research has focused on a different protein called the spike protein, which is used in vaccines. But this study shows that there are other viral proteins, like RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, that our immune system responds to.
To understand more about how our immune system fights the virus, the scientists compared the T cell response to the COVID-19 virus protein with similar proteins from other cold viruses. They found that the T cells reacted to these similar proteins too, which means they have a broader response to respiratory viruses.
These results, published in a science journal called Frontiers in Immunology, have important implications for making vaccines and treatments not only for COVID-19 but also for other respiratory viruses. They show that we need to study how different respiratory viruses interact with our immune system. By understanding how our immune system works, scientists can develop better ways to fight these viruses.
