In-vitro study surely a fait accompli29 Oct 2021 15:35
From waterloo01 on the ADVFN guild (which I highly recommend).
Seems someone has answered the variant question on our behalf SARS-CoV-2 Alpha, Beta, and Delta variants displayenhanced Spike-mediated syncyt ia formation As the variants did not show any major difference in replicationunder basal conditions, we next investigated whether they were differently sensitive to the interferon response. To this aim, we pre-treated Vero cells or U2OS-ACE2 (S-Fuse) cells with increasing doses of IFN-b1 and infected them with the different variants. IFN-b1 was equally effective at reducing viral replication of D614G, Alpha, and Beta variants in Vero cells (Fig EV3A). Preincubation of S-Fuse cellswith IFN-b1 also abrogated infection and syncytia formation to thesame extent for the different variants (Fig EV3B). Therefore, IFN-b1similarly inhibited viral replication and reduced syncytia formationby D614G, Alpha, and Beta variants htTps://www.embopress.org/doi/epdf/10.15252/embj.2021108944
Freedosh’s take -
Nobby, waterloo01 highlighted the key piece of text. Inhibition of syncytial formation is the critical function, IMO, given the relationship to lung pathology and also cytokine release and hyper inflammation - all in addition to replication inhibition amongst the variants.
“ As the variants did not show any major difference in replicationunder basal conditions, we next investigated whether they were dif-ferently sensitive to the interferon response. To this aim, we pre-treated Vero cells or U2OS-ACE2 (S-Fuse) cells with increasing dosesof IFN-b1 and infected them with the different variants. IFN-b1 wasequally effective at reducing viral replication of D614G, Alpha, andBeta variants in Vero cells (Fig EV3A). Preincubation of S-Fuse cellswith IFN-b1 also abrogated infection and syncytia formation to thesame extent for the different variants (Fig EV3B). Therefore, IFN-b1similarly inhibited viral replication and reduced syncytia formationby D614G, Alpha, and Beta variants.
As good as it gets.