Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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What is the key finding about vaccines and bone marrow?
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Okay, I want to start with vaccines because it's feeling a little germy out there, y'all. There's so much flu and COVID going around. I am very glad I'm vaccinated.
How do vaccines interact with our immune system?
Yeah, vaccines are so powerful. They train your immune system to recognize and fight germs. And one of the ways they do so is by prompting your B cells to create antibodies. You can think of antibodies like security guards. So the COVID mRNA vaccine generates enough of an antibody response to protect against infection for three months and severe disease for six months. But other vaccines offer years-long, even lifelong immunity.
Lifetime security, like the measles vaccine.
Yeah, exactly, or the yellow fever vaccine. And this contrast is actually what led Stanford medicine professor Bali Pulendran to wonder, like, why? Why are some vaccines able to stimulate immunity for a few months, but others last a lifetime?
If you could understand the immunology underlying these effects, then surely we could apply that immunological insight to devising new vaccines, perhaps synthetic vaccines, that could effectively recapitulate the high degree of efficacy of this yellow fever vaccine.
And it was through this basic research question that Bali and a team at Stanford Medicine uncovered a major insight having to do with megakaryocytes.
What role do megakaryocytes play in vaccine longevity?
What are those? Okay, megakaryocytes. I'm now a fan of them. They are these big, beefy cells chilling in our bone marrow, and they're responsible for making platelets, the things that help your blood clot. But these big cells may have another role. It appears that megakaryocytes create a hospitable environment for those antibody-producing B cells to survive for years. and for the resulting antibody response to persist. Almost like a pro-security guard environment. And that means that vaccines that are better able to activate megakaryocytes should stimulate immunity for a longer period of time. The team published these findings in the journal Nature Immunology this month.
Okay, so I'm curious. Is there a way for future vaccines to recruit these bone marrow cells to spur a longer-lasting vaccine?
Yeah, that's one possibility, right? If megakaryocytes are some kind of bellwether for measuring how well a vaccine is doing, that's useful information for doctors to know when their patient may need a booster or for vaccine developers to estimate how long their vaccine might last. Immunology experts I spoke to, including George Lewis at the University of Maryland and Deepta Bhattacharya at the University of Arizona, see the potential. More research is required, but viral outbreaks are more likely in the future, and Bali wants us to be prepared.
It's not a question of if the next pandemic will emerge. It's a question of when the next pandemic is going to emerge.
So ultimately, Bali wants this basic research to lead to better vaccines for everyone.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the key finding about vaccines and bone marrow?
1:09–1:36
2
How do vaccines interact with our immune system?
1:36–2:45
3
What role do megakaryocytes play in vaccine longevity?
2:45–4:25
4
Can future vaccines leverage bone marrow cells for better immunity?
4:25–4:49
5
What are the implications of current vaccine research?
4:49–5:28
6
What fun scientific topic follows the vaccine discussion?
5:28–9:38
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Short Wave
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