So-called high-dose flu vaccines are available for older people. The reason: their immune system does not always respond sufficiently well to the standard flu vaccines. Why this is the case and the molecular processes behind it are not yet understood. However, in their current research work, scientists from the Centre for Individualised Infection Medicine (CiiM), a joint initiative of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and Hannover Medical School (MHH), using a cohort study with around 230 participants over the age of 65, have now been able to identify key molecules. The researchers hope that their findings will help to further increase the immune response to the flu vaccine in older people in the future. The study has been published in the journal “Science Advances”.
The study was based on a cohort of 234 participants over the age of 65 who were vaccinated against influenza. Blood was taken from them at a total of five different times – before and after the vaccination. This was examined in detail using the latest molecular biology methods, which are summarized under the term “multi-omics”. The researchers analyzed the huge amounts of data generated using statistical and computational models. In doing so, they investigated how the immune response differs between those who respond well to the vaccination (responders) and those do not (non-responders). “We were able to identify a number of important molecules that correlated with the good immune response of responders after vaccination. In the non-responders, however, these signature molecules were reduced or not detected at all,” explains Dr. Saumya Kumar, scientist in Yang Li’s research group at CiiM and first author of the study. “And unlike the responders, the non-responders showed an increased number of certain activated immune cells in the blood, so-called Natural Killer cells. The differences that we were able to identify between responders and non-responders at various levels of omics layers were indeed very clear.”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adq7006
