MRNA vaccines saved lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, but older people had less of an immune response to the vaccines than did younger adults.
Why? Boston Children’s researchers, led by Byron Brook, PhD, and Ofer Levy, MD, PhD, have found some answers, while providing proof-of-concept of a new system that can model vaccine responses in a dish. The test system, described in a paper out in iScience, is called MEMPHIS (Modular Evaluation of immunogenicity using Multi-Platform Human In vitro Systems). It analyzes whole human blood from people of different age groups and applies both proteomics and targeted assays to measure the production of cytokines (immune signaling proteins) induced by mRNA vaccines. “Our excitement here is the ability to model responses to mRNA vaccines outside the body in an age-specific fashion, which we demonstrate for the first time,” says Levy, who heads the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s. “Our model gives us insight into vaccine activity in vulnerable populations.” This, in turn, could help expedite the search for more effective vaccines. The team collected blood samples from people in different age groups and added the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID mRNA vaccine to the samples. Extensive tests, including proteomics and systems biology approaches, then measured immune activation in response to the vaccine.
