The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine generates enough of an antibody response to protect against severe disease for six months. But other vaccines offer years-long — even lifelong — immunity, such as the measles or yellow fever vaccines. Is there a way for scientists to tell how long a person's immunity will last? A team at Stanford Medicine might have found a way to do just that — with the help of some of the cells found in our bone marrow. Questions about vaccines or the respiratory season? Email us at [email protected] — we'd love to hear from you!Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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.
Okay, y'all, that was pretty serious. Let's move on to something joyful and one of the purest sources of childhood joy. That is hula hooping. What a pivot. Indeed. What is the physics of keeping a hula hoop swirling around our hips?
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Chapter 4: Can future vaccines leverage bone marrow cells for better immunity?
Okay, so this research began when Leif Ristroff, a math professor at NYU, was admiring some hula hoopers at a park in New York City. And he wondered if there were any mathematical studies showing how hula hoops counteract gravity and levitate. And seeing none, he and two of his students set out to study this and learn some hula hooping themselves.
Okay, this is pretty funny. But how do you actually study this in a mathematical way?
Chapter 5: What are the implications of current vaccine research?
It involves lots of mathematical modeling and physics, too. They created these little hula hooping robots using 3D printed models of different shapes. Some robots had cylinder shapes, others cones, others were hourglass-like. They wiggled all of these shapes with a tiny little hoop just under six inches across.
These shapes, of course, were meant to represent a simplified scaled-down version of a human hula hooping.
And from watching the robot shapes and gathering data, Life and his collaborators developed a bunch of mathematical equations and published those findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Okay, the suspense is killing me. What shapes were the best for hula hooping?
Chapter 6: What fun scientific topic follows the vaccine discussion?
Well, all body shapes can hula hoop, but some do have an easier time, you know, keeping that hula hoop up and spinning. And the one that appeared to work the best was the hourglass shape.
Well, now I am concerned that people will think, you know, if I don't have an hourglass figure, I can't hula hoop.
No, totally. I was worried about that, too. But the researchers said that you can actually just give the hula hoop more energy by moving your hips more quickly, like upping the frequency of that circular motion. And also, obviously, hula hooping isn't just for the waist. You can hula hoop on your neck or wrists or ankles.
David Hu, an applied mathematician who did not work on this project, loves how this study teaches people to hula hoop better and thinks it would be an awesome opportunity to combine P.E. and math courses for kids.
I love that idea. Okay, to close us out, I am so ready to hear about all of the exciting space news that I should be looking forward to this year.
We have our colleague Shondelise Duster to thank, who gathered data on all of the major missions of 2025. And there are a ton of exciting ones.
Yeah, starting as early as this month. In January, there are two missions expected to launch for the moon. One is called Resilience Mission 2, and the other is called Blue Ghost.
All right. I love the names, but what is up with these missions?
Both these missions are commercial missions, meaning they're spacecraft that are built by private companies, and they're trying to pull off moon landings. So it'll be exciting to see if they're successful. There's been a lot of recent history of commercial missions to the moon crashing or failing. And I am assuming these are uncrewed missions? Yeah, uncrewed.
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