Preliminary identification of potential vaccine targets for the COVID-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) based on SARS-CoV immunological studies

Syed Faraz Ahmed; Ahmed A. Quadeer; Matthew R. McKay

Various reports related to SARS-CoV suggest a protective role of both humoral and cell-mediated immune responses. For the former case, antibody responses generated against the S protein, the most exposed protein of SARS-CoV, have been shown to protect from infection in mouse models (Deming et al., 2006; Graham et al., 2012; Yang et al., 2004) . In addition, multiple studies have shown that antibodies generated against the N protein of SARS-CoV, a highly immunogenic and abundantly expressed protein during infection (Lin et al., 2003) , were particularly prevalent in SARS-CoV-infected patients (X Liu et al., 2004; J. Wang et al., 2003) . While being effective, the antibody response was found to be short-lived in convalescent SARS-CoV patients (Tang et al., 2011) . In contrast, T cell responses have been shown to provide long-term protection (Fan et al., 2009; Peng et al., 2006; Tang et al., 2011) , even up to 11 years post-infection (Ng et al., 2016) , and thus has attracted more interest for a prospective vaccine against SARS-CoV [reviewed in (W. J. Liu et al., 2017) ]. Among all SARS-