Is Molecular Mimicry between hPF4 and SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein a Potential Basis for Autoimmune Responses in Vaccinated and Naturally Infected Patients?

Sergio Carnevale; Marta Giovanetti; Domenico Benvenuto; Massimo Ciccozzi; Francesco Broccolo

doi:10.1055/s-0041-1742092

Seminars in Thrombosis and Hemostasis, Inhaltsverzeichnis

Semin Thromb Hemost 2023; 49(01): 103-104
DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1742092

Letter to the Editor

Is Molecular Mimicry between hPF4 and SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein a Potential Basis for Autoimmune Responses in Vaccinated and Naturally Infected Patients?

Sergio Carnevale

¹Cerba HealthCare Italia, Section of Anatomic Pathology, Milan, Italy

,

Marta Giovanetti

²Laboratório de Flavivírus, Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

,

Domenico Benvenuto

³Medical Statistic and Molecular Epidemiology Unit, University of Biomedical Campus, Rome, Italy

,

Massimo Ciccozzi

³Medical Statistic and Molecular Epidemiology Unit, University of Biomedical Campus, Rome, Italy

,

Francesco Broccolo

⁴Department of Medicine and Surgery, School of Medicine, University of Milano-Bicocca, Monza, Italy

⁵Cerba HealthCare Italia, Milan, Italy

References
1 Cavaleri M, Enzmann H, Straus S, Cooke E. The European Medicines Agency's EU conditional marketing authorisations for COVID-19 vaccines. Lancet 2021; 397 (10272): 355-357
2 Paul-Ehrlich-Institut (Bundesinstitut für Impfstoffe und biomedizinische Arzneimittel). Service-Presse-Sehr seltene Fälle des “Thrombose-mit-Thrombozytopenie Syndroms (TTS) nach Impfung. 2021 . Accessed December 13, 2021 at: https://www.pei.de/DE/service/presse/aktuelles/aktuellesinhalt.html%20approached%20May%2031
3 Greinacher A, Thiele T, Warkentin TE, Weisser K, Kyrle PA, Eichinger S. Thrombotic thrombocytopenia after ChAdOx1 nCov-19 vaccination. N Engl J Med 2021; 384 (22) 2092-2101
4 Schultz NH, Sørvoll IH, Michelsen AE. et al. Thrombosis and thrombocytopenia after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination. N Engl J Med 2021; 384 (22) 2124-2130
5 Scully M, Singh D, Lown R. et al. Pathologic antibodies to platelet factor 4 after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination. N Engl J Med 2021; 384 (23) 2202-2211
6 Muir K-L, Kallam A, Koepsell SA, Gundabolu K. Thrombotic thrombocytopenia after Ad26.COV2.S vaccination. N Engl J Med 2021; 384 (20) 1964-1965
7 Sadoff J, Davis K, Douoguih M. Thrombotic thrombocytopenia after Ad26.COV2.S vaccination—response from the manufacturer. N Engl J Med 2021; 384 (20) 1965-1966
8 Arepally GM, Ortel TL. Vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia: what we know and do not know. Blood 2021; 138 (04) 293-298
9 Rzymski P, Perek B, Flisiak R. Thrombotic thrombocytopenia after COVID-19 vaccination: in search of the underlying mechanism. Vaccines (Basel) 2021; 9 (06) 559
10 McGonagle D, De Marco G, Bridgewood C. Mechanisms of immunothrombosis in vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT) compared to natural SARS-CoV-2 infection. J Autoimmun 2021; 121 (121) 102662
11 Cai Z, Greene MI, Zhu Z, Zhang H. Structural features and PF4 functions that occur in heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) complicated by COVID-19. Antibodies (Basel) 2020; 9 (04) 52
12 Carnevale S, Beretta P, Morbini P. Direct endothelial damage and vasculitis due to SARS-CoV-2 in small bowel submucosa of COVID-19 patient with diarrhea. J Med Virol 2021; 93 (01) 61-63
13 Hall TA. BioEdit: A User-Friendly Biological Sequence Alignment Editor and Analysis Program for Windows 95/98/NT. Nucleic Acids Symposium Series 1999; (41) 95-98
14 Waterhouse A, Bertoni M, Bienert S. et al. SWISS-MODEL: homology modelling of protein structures and complexes. Nucleic Acids Res 2018; 46 (W1): W296-W303
15 Zimmermann L, Stephens A, Nam SZ. et al. A completely reimplemented MPI bioinformatics toolkit with a new HHpred server at its core. J Mol Biol 2018; 430 (15) 2237-2243
16 Jespersen MC, Peters B, Nielsen M, Marcatili P. BepiPred-2.0: improving sequence-based B-cell epitope prediction using conformational epitopes. Nucleic Acids Res 2017; 45 (W1): W24-W29
17 Tsilingiris D, Vallianou NG, Karampela I, Dalamaga M. Vaccine induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia: the shady chapter of a success story. Metabol Open 2021; 11 (11) 100101