Blood Collection Study From COVID-19 Convalescents Previously Hospitalized to Identify Immunogenic Viral Epitopes

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global emergency threatening to take millions of lives in the United States and around the world. There is no current vaccine strategy against COVID-19 infection caused by a novel coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2. Studies with a related coronavirus called SARS-CoV-1 that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003 indicated that memory CD8+ T cells recognizing viral epitopes persisted for more than 6 years post infection while neutralizing antibodies and memory B cells were short-lived and were undetectable after a short period of time (Tang et al., 2011; Peng et al., 2006; Channappanavar et al., 2014). Thus, including viral epitopes that are recognized by memory CD8+ T cells is imperative for vaccines that can provide long-term immunity against SARS-CoV-2. In this study, blood samples from COVID-19 patients who have recovered from the infection will be used to identify the viral epitopes recognized by their memory CD8+ T cells. This will be accomplished using a genome-wide, high-throughput screening technology developed at Harvard Medical School (Kula et al., 2019) and licensed by the study sponsor, TScan Therapeutics. A 24,000-member library that tiles across all ~100 viral isolates of SARS-CoV-2 that have been sequenced so far has already been synthesized at TScan. Blood samples from convalescent patients are urgently needed to identify T cell receptors and immunogenic viral epitopes on SARS-CoV-2. It is the hope that these data will inform development of a vaccine with the potential for long-lasting protection against SARS-CoV-2.