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With Its Latest Prominent Variant, SARS-CoV-2 is Up to Its Old Tricks
Antibody Solutions has been tracing the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 from the earliest days of the pandemic. As part of our program developing antibodies to prevent spike protein cell entry via cleavage at the S1/S2 site by furin, we’ve followed the evolution of the S1/S2 sequence as it emerged from one dominant variant to the next. We’ve observed that the Delta variant was likely the most infectious variant of SARS-CoV-2 to date, and we offered our predictions that subsequent Omicron variants – dominant for most of 2023 – would be “highly transmissible, but with lower disease severity,” a prediction that turned out to be correct, both in broad reports and in studies of small patient groups.