Researchers at UC Berkeley, the Gladstone Institutes and the Innovative Genomics Institute discovered that the antibodies generated against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants are less effective against the omicron variant.
The omicron variant was first detected in South Africa in late 2021, according to Abdullah Syed, the first author and a postdoctoral fellow at campus professor Jennifer Doudna’s lab. Although COVID-19 has generated many variants since 2020, Syed said the omicron variant is “different” because it had the most mutations and spread more rapidly than other variants.