(Press-News.org) *Note: this paper is being presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and is being published in The Lancet Rheumatology. Please credit both the congress and the journal in your stories*
A new study presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and published in The Lancet Rheumatology, shows that the antibody - but not the T-cell - response to the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is weakened in patients taking the immunosuppressant methotrexate. In contrast, antibody and T cell responses are preserved in patients taking biological drugs such as tumour necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors.
Around 3% to 7% of people in Europe and North America have immune-related inflammatory diseases such as psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease. Treatments such as methotrexate, TNF inhibitors, and other targeted biological therapies work by suppressing the immune system and, while they can be highly effective, they can also increase the risk of serious infections.
Patients taking immunosuppressants for immune-mediated inflammatory diseases were excluded from COVID-19 vaccine trials, so there is a lack of data on how well they work in this vulnerable group.
Assessment of immune responses to a single dose of vaccine is particularly important given that many countries, including the UK, have extended the interval between doses to maximise population coverage.
Dr Satveer Mahil, Professor Catherine Smith and colleagues at St John's Institute of Dermatology, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK and King's College London, enrolled 101 participants from January 14 2021 to April 4 2021 (84 patients with the skin condition psoriasis and 17 healthy volunteers). The participants' median age was 43, 55% were male, 84% were of White ethnicity, and none had had COVID-19 previously.
The psoriasis patients were taking methotrexate (17 patients, median dose of 15 mg/week), TNF inhibitors (27 patients), interleukin (IL)-17 inhibitors (15 patients) or IL-23 inhibitors (25 patients).
Immune responses were measured immediately before being given a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine and 28 days later. The primary outcomes were humoral immunity (neutralising antibody response) to the wild-type SARS-CoV-2 virus and T-cell response 28 days after vaccination.
Rates of seroconversion (the development of antibodies against the virus) were lower in the patients on immunosuppressants. All 17 (100%) healthy volunteers had evidence of seroconversion, compared with 78% of those on immunosuppressants. The lowest seroconversion rate, 47%, was in patients taking methotrexate.
Levels of neutralising antibodies, antibodies able to stop the virus from entering cells, were significantly lower in patients taking methotrexate compared to healthy controls but were preserved in those taking biologics.
T-cell responses were detected in all groups at similar rates and levels, and many participants without evidence of seroconversion showed a T-cell response.
Levels of neutralising antibodies to the B.1.1.7 (Alpha) variant were also tested. These were similarly low in all participants (including healthy volunteers), underlining the need to continue to take preventative measures after having a first dose of the vaccine.
Data on the participants' response to the second dose are awaited.
The authors say: "While global mass COVID-19 vaccination programmes are underway, there remains concern over vaccine efficacy in immunocompromised patients, including against novel SARS-CoV-2 variants that threaten immune escape."
"Measures of the immune response that correspond to decreased risk of COVID-19 after vaccination are unknown, and emerging research in immunocompromised patients has focused on seroconversion alone. We show that serological responses are not representative of the complex immune response to vaccines."
"Our data showing that the T-cell responses following the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine were not affected in those taking methotrexate or a biologic therapy - including in some of those who didn't seroconvert - is reassuring. However, ongoing monitoring of these patients is needed to determine what this means for the clinical effectiveness of the vaccines."
INFORMATION:
*Note: this paper is being presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and is being published in The Lancet Microbe. Please credit both the congress and the journal in your stories*
A new study presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and published in The Lancet Microbe, shows that antibodies generated by CoronaVac, an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine, work less well against the P.1 Brazil (Gamma) variant.
It also suggests that the P.1 variant may be able to reinfect individuals who previously had COVID-19. ...
Interim data from a phase 3 trial of a COVID-19 vaccine developed in China (CoronaVac) suggests that two doses offer 83.5% protection against symptomatic COVID-19.
The preliminary findings, published in The Lancet and presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), indicate that CoronaVac induces a robust antibody response. No severe adverse events or deaths were reported among the more than 10,000 trial participants in Turkey, with most adverse events mild and occurring within 7 days of an injection. However, more research is needed to confirm vaccine efficacy in the long term, in a more diverse group of participants, and against emerging variants of concern.
CoronaVac uses an inactivated whole virus. When people receive the vaccine, ...
Led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Avenir Health, the research team carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis of syphilis prevalence among MSM between 2000 to 2020, drawing on data from 275 studies involving more than 600,000 study participants across 77 countries.
The worldwide prevalence of syphilis among MSM was 15x higher than most recent estimates for men in the general population (7.5% versus 0.5%). Researchers further estimated the prevalence across eight regions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and six regions of the WHO. Latin America and the Caribbean region had the highest prevalence of syphilis (10.6%), whereas Australia and New Zealand had the lowest (1.9%). ...
A new paper in Nature lays out the way natural ecosystems parallel U.S. supply chains and how American cities can use these tools to strengthen their supply chains.
The paper, "Supply chain diversity buffers cities against food shocks," is co-authored by Benjamin Ruddell, director of the FEWSION Project and the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University, and Richard Rushforth, an assistant research professor in SICCS, in collaboration with FEWSION project researchers at Penn State. FEWSION is an NSF-funded collaboration that uses comprehensive data mapping to monitor domestic supply chains for food, water and energy down to the county level.
This research looks at the importance of diversity within the ...
Remember Napster? The peer-to-peer file sharing company, popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, depended on users sharing their music files. To promote cooperation, such software "could mislead its users," says Bryce Morsky, a postdoc in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences.
Some file-sharing companies falsely asserted that all of their users were sharing. Or, they displayed the mean number of files shared per user, hiding the fact that some users were sharing a great deal and many others were not. Related online forums promoted the idea that sharing was both ethical and the norm. ...
As light detection and ranging (lidar) technology evolves, forest ecology and ecological restoration researchers have been using these tools in a wide range of applications.
"We needed an accounting of relative accuracy and errors among lidar platforms within a range of forest types and structural configurations," said associate professor Andrew Sánchez Meador, executive director of NAU's Ecological Restoration Institute (ERI).
Sánchez Meador led a study recently published in Remote Sensing, "Adjudicating Perspectives on Forest Structure: How Do Airborne, ...
Hundreds of millions of years ago, in the middle of what would eventually become Canada's Yukon Territory, an ocean swirled with armored trilobites, clam-like brachiopods and soft, squishy creatures akin to slugs and squid.
A trove of fossils and rock layers formed on that ancient ocean floor have now been unearthed by an international team of scientists along the banks of the Peel River a few hundred miles south of the Arctic's Beaufort Sea. The discovery reveals oxygen changes at the seafloor across nearly 120 million years of the early Paleozoic era, a time that fostered the most rapid development and diversification of complex, multi-cellular life in Earth's history.
"It's unheard of to have that much of Earth's history in one place," said Stanford University geological ...
Our gut microbiome -- the ever-changing "rainforest" of bacteria living in our intestines -- is primarily affected by our lifestyle, including what we eat or the medications we take, most studies show.
But a University of Notre Dame study has found a much greater genetic component at play than was once known.
In the study, published recently in END ...
Nonprofits and companies planting trees in the tropics may often pick species for their commercial rather than ecological value, researchers found in a new analysis of organizations' publicly available data. They also found many may not have tracked the trees' survival.
Tree planting is a promising, but controversial, restoration strategy for fighting climate change. A new study in the journal Biological Conservation provides a detailed look at what restoration organizations across the tropics are actually doing on the ground.
"We found some organizations placed an emphasis on biological diversity and forest restoration in their mission statements. When we looked at the species they reported ...
Major ecosystem changes like sea-level rise, desertification and lake warming are fueling uncertainty about the future. Many initiatives - such as those fighting to fully eradicate non-native species, or to combat wildfires - focus on actively resisting change to preserve a slice of the past.
However, resisting ecosystem transformation is not always a feasible approach. According to a new paper published today in the Ecological Society of America's journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, accepting and directing ecosystem change are also viable responses, and should not necessarily be viewed as fallback options or as last resorts. The paper presents a set of guiding principles for applying a "RAD" strategy - a framework that involves ...
