AI Summary
The article discusses the development of artificial "lymphoid organ-chips" that mimic the human immune system's response to booster vaccines. These organ-chips could aid in predicting the effectiveness of new booster vaccines for diseases like COVID-19. The technology aims to address the challenge of rapidly evolving viruses and varying individual immune responses to vaccines. This innovation could help in evaluating immune responses in high-risk populations quickly, showcasing its potential in advancing vaccine research and personalized medicine.
Researchers at the Institut Pasteur in France have developed artificial “lymphoid organ-chips” that recreate much of the human immune system’s response to booster vaccines. The technology, described in an article to be published September 6 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), could potentially be used to evaluate the likely effectiveness of new protein and mRNA-based booster vaccines for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.
The rapid mutation and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses means that booster vaccines must be developed equally rapidly to provide protection from emerging viral strains. The effectiveness of updated vaccines can be hard to predict, however. The recent bivalent mRNA COVID vaccine, for example, turned out to be no more effective than the original monovalent vaccine against the emerging Omicron variant that it was designed to combat. One reason for this unpredictability is that the laboratory animals used to test new vaccines have slightly different immune systems than humans. Another reason is that humans can vary greatly in their response to a vaccine, depending, in part, on their individual history of infection and vaccination.
The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need for preclinical systems that enable a rapid evaluation of immune responses elicited by candidate booster vaccines, particularly within specific cohorts of high-risk individuals.”
Lisa Chakrabarti, group leader within the Virus and Immunity Unit, Institut Pasteur
The immune system’s response to a vaccine is coordinated in secondary lymphoid organs, such as the lymph nodes and spleen, where various types of immune cell