Ganusov Vitaly V
Department of Microbiology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA.
Department of Mathematics, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA.
medRxiv. 2023 Jun 29:2023.06.28.23291950. doi: 10.1101/2023.06.28.23291950.
One of the goals of vaccination is to induce long-term immunity against the infection and/or disease. However, evaluating the duration of protection following vaccination often requires long-term follow-ups that can conflict with the desire to rapidly publish results. Arunachalam et al. JCI 2023 followed individuals receiving third or fourth dose of mRNA COVID19 vaccines for up to 6 months and in finding that the levels of SARS-CoV2-specific antibodies (Abs) declined with similar rates for the two groups came to the conclusion that additional boosting is unnecessary to prolong immunity to SARS-CoV-2. However, this may be premature conclusion to make. Accordingly, we demonstrate that measuring Ab levels at 3 time points and only for a short (up to 6 month) duration does not allow to accurately and rigorously evaluate the long-term half-life of vaccine-induced Abs. By using the data from a cohort of blood donors followed for several years, we show that after re-vaccination with vaccinia virus (VV), VV-specific Abs decay bi-phasically and even the late decay rate exceeds the true slow loss rate of humoral memory observed years prior to the boosting. We argue that mathematical modeling should be used to better optimize sampling schedules to provide more reliable advice about the duration of humoral immunity after repeated vaccinations.
疫苗接种的目标之一是诱导对感染和/或疾病的长期免疫力。然而，评估疫苗接种后的保护持续时间通常需要长期随访，这可能与快速发表结果的愿望相冲突。阿鲁纳恰拉姆等人在《临床研究杂志》2023年的研究中，对接受第三剂或第四剂mRNA新冠疫苗的个体进行了长达6个月的随访，发现两组中严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒2（SARS-CoV-2）特异性抗体（Abs）水平以相似的速率下降，从而得出结论，认为无需额外加强接种来延长对SARS-CoV-2的免疫力。然而，这可能是一个过早得出的结论。因此，我们证明，仅在3个时间点且仅在短时间（长达6个月）内测量抗体水平，无法准确、严格地评估疫苗诱导抗体的长期半衰期。通过使用对一组献血者进行数年随访得到的数据，我们表明，在用痘苗病毒（VV）重新接种后，VV特异性抗体呈双相衰减，甚至后期衰减率超过了加强接种前数年观察到的体液记忆的真正缓慢丧失率。我们认为，应该使用数学模型来更好地优化采样计划，以便为重复接种后体液免疫的持续时间提供更可靠的建议。
