Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA; Department of Internal Medicine and Center of Excellence for Biomedical Research (CEBR), University of Genoa, Genoa 16132, Italy.
Cell Host Microbe. 2022 Mar 9;30(3):388-399.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.chom.2022.02.003. Epub 2022 Feb 8.
Both SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 vaccines elicit memory T cell responses. Here, we report the development of 2 pools of experimentally defined SARS-CoV-2 T cell epitopes that, in combination with spike, were used to discriminate 4 groups of subjects with different SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccine status. The overall T cell-based classification accuracy was 89.2% and 88.5% in the experimental and validation cohorts. This scheme was applicable to different mRNA vaccines and different lengths of time post infection/post vaccination and yielded increased accuracy when compared to serological readouts. T cell responses from breakthrough infections were also studied and effectively segregated from vaccine responses, with a combined performance of 86.6% across all 239 subjects from the 5 groups. We anticipate that a T cell-based immunodiagnostic scheme to classify subjects based on their vaccination and natural infection history will be an important tool for longitudinal monitoring of vaccinations and for establishing SARS-CoV-2 correlates of protection.
SARS-CoV-2 感染和 COVID-19 疫苗均可引发记忆 T 细胞应答。在此，我们报告了 2 组经实验定义的 SARS-CoV-2 T 细胞表位的开发，这些表位与刺突蛋白结合，用于区分具有不同 SARS-CoV-2 感染和 COVID-19 疫苗状况的 4 组受试者。在实验组和验证组中，基于 T 细胞的总体分类准确性分别为 89.2%和 88.5%。该方案适用于不同的 mRNA 疫苗和不同的感染后/接种后时间，与血清学检测结果相比，其准确性有所提高。还研究了突破性感染的 T 细胞反应，并将其与疫苗反应有效区分开来，在来自 5 组的所有 239 名受试者中，综合性能达到 86.6%。我们预计，一种基于 T 细胞的免疫诊断方案，根据受试者的接种和自然感染史对其进行分类，将成为纵向监测疫苗接种和建立 SARS-CoV-2 保护相关因素的重要工具。
