{"doi":"10.1101/2021.05.29.445137","title":"Functional characterization of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine elicited antibodies in immunologically naïve and pre-immune humans","abstract":"Abstract As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the authorization of vaccines for emergency use has been crucial in slowing down the rate of infection and transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. In order to investigate the longitudinal serological responses to SARS-CoV-2 natural infection and vaccination, a large-scale, multi-year serosurveillance program entitled SPARTA (SARS SeroPrevalence and Respiratory Tract Assessment) was initiated at 4 locations in the U.S. The serological assay presented here measuring IgG binding to the SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain (RBD) detected antibodies elicited by SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination with a 95.5% sensitivity and a 95.9% specificity. We used this assay to screen more than 3100 participants and selected 20 previously infected pre-immune and 32 immunologically naïve participants to analyze their antibody binding to RBD and viral neutralization (VN) responses following vaccination with two doses of either the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 or the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine. Vaccination not only elicited a more robust immune reaction than natural infection, but the level of neutralizing and anti-RBD antibody binding after vaccination is also significantly higher in pre-immune participants compared to immunologically naïve participants ( p <0.0033). Furthermore, the administration of the second vaccination did not further increase the neutralizing or binding antibody levels in pre-immune participants ( p =0.69). However, ~46% of the immunologically naïve participants required both vaccinations to seroconvert.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2021,"id":217486,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9529,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":551964,"name":"Hyesun Jang","orcid":"0000-0002-8142-8222","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":299101,"name":"Rodrigo B. Abreu","orcid":"0000-0002-6770-6396","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":701336,"name":"Hannah B. Hanley","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":700594,"name":"Jasper L. Gattiker","orcid":"0000-0002-5579-8262","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":701337,"name":"Alexandria M. Jefferson","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":245069,"name":"Ted M. Ross","orcid":"0000-0003-1947-7469","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":671254,"name":"David Forgacs","orcid":"0000-0002-3553-3320","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":46,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:53:20.374789Z","pmid":"34100015","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}