January 2023 CIC Webinar: Featured Q&A
January 2023 CIC Webinar: Featured Q&A
Our monthly CIC webinars inspire some really fantastic audience Q&A sessions! In each monthly newsletter, we highlight one of the insightful questions raised from the webinar attendees.
A Featured Question from our January 2023 Webinar
This question was for Rebecca Powell, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who presented on the NSF grant "Comprehensive assessment of SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies in human milk to determine their potential as a COVID-19 therapeutic and as a means to prevent infection of breastfed babies."
You can watch Rebecca Powell's full presentation on our YouTube channel.
Question:
Were there any unexpected or surprising results that came out of your research?
Answer from Rebecca Powell:
I was pretty surprised by how durable the antibody response in milk was over time. Nobody's really been able to study this in the context of any infection or vaccine [prior to COVID]. I'm not the first to study antibodies in milk by any means but [...] before we started doing our work in 2020, nobody was specifically looking at secretory antibodies. [...] You know, vaccine response, just don't last because they're more like the declining serum response. But there's something special about this mucosal response - the secretory antibody response. I think we evolved to have these long-lived b cells in the mammary gland. We don't really understand how this is such a great long-lasting response, but it definitely is, and we intend to look more at that.
Thank you to all of our January 2023 speakers and our CIC Community audience members for keeping the conversation going!