2024/03/07/Conjecture-the-maximum-NAb-titer

[utterances-bot]

Conjecture—the maximimum possible neutralizing antibody titer | Nothing Is One Thing

This is the next in what is looking like a series of “Night Science” posts about how the immune system works, from the point of view of someone who thinks a lot about the impacts of immunity on human infections but has a very incomplete and idiosynchratic knowledge of immunology. As explained in this post, my goal in sharing this kind of thing is to show multiscale thinking in action—what does it look like to make quantitative connections across domains, with an eye toward thinking more clearly about how biology and epidemiology interact? Anyway, enjoy!

https://famulare.github.io/2024/03/07/Conjecture-the-maximum-NAb-titer.html

[edwenger]

Perhaps Fig 1 showing maternal-to-cord-blood correlations from transplacentral transfer of RSV antibodies from Chu et al. (2017): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5625849/

[famulare]

That also wasn't the one I was remembering, but a good one.

[famulare]

Influenza. New preprint by the Bloom lab characterizing neutralizing antibody titers across a bunch of strains. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.08.584176v1 Highest looks just shy of 2^15 ~ 33,000. I think that’s another virus supporting this conjecture, but I admit I wanna think a little about it.

[famulare]

A couple more comments from @edwenger via private chat, on examples that appear to violate a bound of 2^14 on first blush.

Super high titers against snake venoms. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590171019300104#tbl3 Highest = 2^16.9, which is meaningfully higher than 2^14. I actually think this'll make sense with the simple model in the next post, but I haven't done the math yet. Stay tuned!

Camelid and shark small antibodies and nanobodies are of interest for being highly effective https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2023/animal-nanobodies-changing-medicine. I have much more to learn here, but also looks like an interesting test of the idea!