The variant was first detected in South Africa in October and has now been found in more than a dozen countries.
In both studies, the work was done in the laboratory and not on people, so more research is needed to assess the real threat of the new variant.
“I think there is evidence that these mutations – and I think other mutations – will emerge around the world – and are already emerging – that they are escaping antibodies from previous infections,” said Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, told CNN. “It’s worrying.”
It is not clear whether this means that someone would be vulnerable to the new variant if they already had Covid-19 or what it could mean for people who have been vaccinated.
“When you see two groups independently arriving at the same basic response, good – there is more consonance that they are correct,” said Jesse Bloom, virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
That study looked at far fewer mutations in the variant than the South African studies examined.
None of the studies have been peer-reviewed or published in medical journals.
As scientists find out if these variants are particularly dangerous – and studies are under way in several laboratories around the world – one thing is clear: get the vaccine if you can.
“I would certainly succeed if I could,” said Sigal. “My father-in-law had the opportunity to fly to Israel and pick him up, and I was kicking him out of the house because it is not possible to get here in South Africa.”
A trio of studies
In his research, Sigal found that antibodies from all six study participants failed to fully combat the new variant.
“One participant had a very good response, but no one escaped unscathed,” he said.
The study was published on the website of KRISP, the Kwazulu-Natal research innovation and sequencing platform. The other two studies were posted on a prepress server.
In the study that had similar results, blood was collected from 44 people in South Africa who had Covid-19. Almost all cases were confirmed to have occurred before September, that is, before the variant was detected in South Africa.
The researchers then checked whether their antibodies would fight the new variant.
For about half of the 44 people, their antibodies were powerless against the new variant. For the other half, the antibody response was weakened, but not entirely eliminated.
In the third study, done at Rockefeller University, the researchers analyzed the blood of 20 people who received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. Different mutations in the viruses allowed some to escape some types of antibodies, but the volunteers’ immune systems launched an army of different types of antibodies against the viruses.
The Rockefeller study found fewer mutations than the two South African studies. He analyzed three major mutations in the peaks at the top of the coronavirus, since this is the part of the virus targeted by vaccines.
“This is useful, but it is not yet the full story,” said John Moore, vaccine researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine.
South African studies, however, used the virus itself, or a model of it, which contained eight peak mutations.