13
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Computational modelling predicts that Dengue virus antibodies can bind to SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding sites: Is pre-exposure to dengue virus protective against COVID-19 severity?

      Preprint
      , , , ,
      Center for Open Science

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The world is going through the scourge of COVID-19 pandemic since last several months. The pandemic appears to be less severe in highly Dengue endemic countries. Furthermore, COVID-19 in two elderly patients (with no evidence of Dengue virus (DV) infection) elicited antibodies that gave false-positive results in DV serological tests. We anticipated that SARS-CoV-2 and DV share antigenic similarity and performed molecular docking studies. Our computational modelling studies predicted that human anti-DV antibodies can indeed, bind to RBD of SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein. Some of these interactions can also potentially intercept human ACE2 receptor binding to RBM. Our computational analysis showed that m396 Ab (against SARS-CoV-1) did not dock with RBM of SARS-CoV-2, a fact already proven experimentally. This confirmed reliability and robustness of our approach. So, immunological memory to DV in endemic countries is thwarting COVID-19. Available Dengue vaccines can be repurposed against SARS-CoV-2 in DV non-endemic countries until approved vaccines/ antivirals become available against COVID-19. Based on the observations that COVID-19 and Dengue severity maps do not tend to overlap and the fact that serological cross-reactivity has been reported for COVID-19 antibodies with Dengue antigen (s), together with results from our computational studies, it is imperative that serology-based diagnosis should be complemented with NAT/virus antigen detection-based tests for definitive diagnosis of either disease in regions where both of these viruses are now co-existent. Furthermore, we still do not know whether antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 will hinder/ameliorate DV infections by binding to DV particles and reduce dengue incidences in the future or, augment DV infection and severity by means of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Contributors
          (View ORCID Profile)
          Journal
          Center for Open Science
          June 19 2020
          Article
          10.31219/osf.io/dutx4
          fc932139-b1f1-49b7-a5ba-256aa5f3f937
          © 2020

          https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article