Immune Evasion by the Highly Mutated SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant

Hylemariam Mihiretie Mengist,1 John Arnaud Kombe Kombe,2 Tengchuan Jin2,3 1Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, 230001, People’s Republic of China; 2Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, the CAS Key Laboratory of Innate Immunity and Chronic Disease, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, People’s Republic of China; 3CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, Chinese Academy of Science, Shanghai, 200031, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Tengchuan Jin, Email [email protected]: The currently circulating SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant posed a big challenge for the ongoing pandemic prevention and control activities. The critical concern is whether the current vaccines and therapeutics are capable of fully controlling this variant. Omicron has several mutations mainly concentrated in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) which is the main target for neutralizing antibodies and vaccine-elicited sera, and it is reportedly evading immunity. However, the degree to which the Omicron evades immunity and its impact on the prevention and control activities requires recent and continuous scrutiny. Despite several reports are available, updated and recent discussions are important to tackle the ongoing pandemic especially due to the emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. Therefore, new insights on designing effective preventive and control measures is utmost important. This review discusses the extent of immune evasion by the Omicron variant and forwards important directions which could have valuable contributions to design alternative strategies in fighting against SARS-Co-2 variants.Keywords: SARSC-CoV-2, variant of concern, VOC, Omicron variant, immune evasion, receptor-binding domain, RB