Immune cells may be to blame for flu jab's waning effectiveness as we age

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-11-09 03:00

Australia; International; VIC

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Australian and UK scientists say a type of immune cell called a memory B cell becomes less effective as we age, which may explain why flu vaccines work less well among the elderly than in younger people. To investigate, the team tracked B cells in 20 healthy people after they were given a trivalent flu jab. Younger people developed an 'atypical' type of B cell in response, and these cells derived from a particular type of cell precursor known as a germinal centre precursor. However, this process happened to a much lesser extent in elderly people. The findings suggest that the activity of both germinal precursors and memory B cells decrease as we age, which may explain why flu jabs don't work as well among older people, the researchers say.

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Journal/
conference: Cell Reports

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, The University of Melbourne, Monash University, The Babraham Institute, UK, Francis Crick Institute, UK

Funder: The NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Center (BRC) is a partnership between Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Cambridge, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). We are indebted to the NIHR Cambridge BRC volunteers for their participation, and we thank the NIHR Cambridge BRC staff for their contribution in coordinating the vaccinations and venepuncture. We thank the staff of the Babraham Institute Flow Cytometry Facility, Bioinformatics Group, the Sequencing Facility, and Silvia Innocentin for their technical assistance. We thank Dr. Geoff Butcher for his comments on this project throughout. For the purpose of Open Access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. This study was supported by H2020 European Research Council funding awarded to M.A.L. (637801-TWILIGHT), Evelyn Trust funding (19/20) awarded to E.J.C. and M.A.L., and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBS/E/B/000C0427, BBS/E/B/000C0428, and the Campus Capability Core Grant to the Babraham Institute). A.R.B. is supported by a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship (222793/Z/21/Z). D.L.H. is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council Australia Early-Career Fellowship (APP1139911). E.J.C. was supported by the Francis Crick Institute, which receives its core funding from Cancer Research UK (CC2087), the UK Medical Research Council (CC2087), and the Wellcome Trust (CC2087). M.A.L. is an EMBO Young Investigator and Lister Institute Prize Fellow.

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