Back

Identification of protective human monoclonal antibodies using a K18 hACE2 transgenic mouse SARS-CoV-2 challenge model

Borate, B.; Pino, P. A.; Hicks, A.; Garcia, J. I.; Garcia-Vilanova, A.; Ye, C.; Park, J.-G.; Maingot, B.; Rodriguez, O.; Saveria, T.; Holman, D.; Schendel, S. L.; Saphire, E. O.; Martinez-Sobrido, L.; Torrelles, J. B.; Fiore-Gartland, A.

2025-09-19 immunology
10.1101/2025.09.13.675985 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), uses human angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (hACE2) as its obligate receptor for cell entry. The K18 hACE2 transgenic mouse line, which expresses hACE2 under control of the human keratin 18 (K18) promoter, is used as an animal model for the study of COVID-19 pathogenesis. Here, we evaluate this model in the screening of human monoclonal antibody (hmAb) therapies against SARS-CoV-2. We included 206 hmAbs from the Coronavirus Immunotherapeutic Consortium Database (CoVIC-DB) and identified many that protected against a lethal challenge with the virus. Our data showed that mouse weight change from day 5 onward highly correlated with survival. Many of the protective hmAb candidates we identified also showed strong viral neutralization and spike protein (SP) binding when measured in vitro; however, in many cases, in vitro assays failed to identify protective hmAbs, suggesting that the mouse model may capture characteristics of the hmAbs that other methods cannot. Our findings demonstrate the relevance of including in vivo models for the characterization of therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2, as these improve both accuracy and expediency in the screening process.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.