id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-321166-nvphu1fm	Thomson, Emma C.	The circulating SARS-CoV-2 spike variant N439K maintains fitness while evading antibody-mediated immunity	2020-11-05		.txt	text/plain	9813	514	55	We find that the N439K mutation is associated with a similar clinical spectrum of disease and slightly higher viral loads in vivo compared with isolates with the wild-type N439 residue, and that it results in immune escape from polyclonal sera from a proportion of recovered individuals and a panel of neutralizing mAbs. N439K provides a sentinel example of immune escape, indicating that RBM variants must be evaluated when considering vaccines and the therapeutic or prophylactic use of mAbs. Long term control of the pandemic will require systematic monitoring of immune escape variants and selection of strategies that address the variants circulating in targeted populations. Fitness of this variant, N439K, was demonstrated by repeated emergence by convergent evolution, spread to multiple countries and significant representation in the SARS-CoV-2 sequence databases, the fact that the N439K RBD retains a high affinity interaction with the hACE2 receptor, efficient viral replication in cultured cells, and no disease attenuation in a large cohort of infected individuals.	./cache/cord-321166-nvphu1fm.txt	./txt/cord-321166-nvphu1fm.txt