Back

Intestinal helminth infection impairs vaccine-induced T cell responses and protection against SARS-CoV-2

Desai, P.; Karl, C. E.; Ying, B.; Liang, C.-Y.; Garcia-Salum, T.; Santana, A. C.; Caten, F. T.; Urban, J. F.; Elbashir, S. M.; Edwards, D. K.; Ribeiro, S. P.; Thackray, L. B.; Sekaly, R.-P. K.; Diamond, M. S.

2024-01-15 immunology
10.1101/2024.01.14.575588 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Although vaccines have reduced COVID-19 disease burden, their efficacy in helminth infection endemic areas is not well characterized. We evaluated the impact of infection by Heligmosomoides polygyrus bakeri (Hpb), a murine intestinal hookworm, on the efficacy of an mRNA vaccine targeting the Wuhan-1 spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. Although immunization generated similar B cell responses in Hpb-infected and uninfected mice, polyfunctional CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses were markedly reduced in Hpb-infected mice. Hpb-infected and mRNA vaccinated mice were protected against the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strain WA1/2020, but control of lung infection was diminished against an Omicron variant compared to animals immunized without Hpb infection. Helminth mediated suppression of spike-specific CD8+ T cell responses occurred independently of STAT6 signaling, whereas blockade of IL-10 rescued vaccine-induced CD8+ T cell responses. In mice, intestinal helminth infection impairs vaccine induced T cell responses via an IL-10 pathway and compromises protection against antigenically shifted SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Matching journals

The top 6 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.