Immunization has saved millions of lives ever since vaccination was discovered more than 200 years ago. Today, vaccines provide protection from more than 20 life-threatening diseases, helping people of all ages live longer, healthier lives. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), immunization currently prevents nearly five million deaths every year from diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, influenza and measles.
Despite the primacy of vaccines in global healthcare, its use and availability are not equal worldwide, as demonstrated during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Compounding this vaccination coverage problem is the fact that vaccines also differ in the lasting power or their potency, with some vaccines offering life-long protection, others for multiple years, and yet others that only last months and require booster doses to retain their potency.
Developing vaccines with long-lasting potency to protect against infectious diseases has stimulated research in many countries. Researchers at Monash University in Australia, who have been studying how the body creates long-lasting antibodies against illnesses, reported that their latest findings provide a better understanding of how immunity is maintained long-term within the body. The study could help revolutionize the immunization process by making it possible to develop longer-lasting vaccines.
Immunologists explain that after a bacteria or virus invades the body they multiply rapidly causing infection and disease. The body’s immune system uses white blood cells to respond to these attacks by creating antibodies that fight back the infection.
Following an infection, the immune system remembers what it learned about how to protect the body against that specific disease.
If your body encounters the same germ again, the white blood cells recognize it and quickly produce antibodies that fight and immunize the body to that infection. Vaccines provide immunization to certain diseases by imitating an infection and thereby helping teach the immune system how to fight off a future infection from a disease.
Vaccines work by displaying our immune system to only the most essential aspects of a bacteria or virus, either the outer protein covering of a germ or another protein made by the germ. Antibodies are then produced in the body to fight these germs and to create immunity and protection against illness.
Vaccines that last the longest are attenuated vaccines, which use a weakened form of the pathogen to help create immunity.These vaccines allow an individual to get the experience of the infection and the immune response to that infection but without exposure to the full-strength virus. While attenuated vaccines tend to be the most long-lasting, there are other options, such as vaccines that use individual proteins from the virus instead of a live virus to help create an immune response. While this is an effective vaccine, the immune response tends to be shorter-lasting in comparison to attenuated vaccines.
However, vaccine immunity is compromised if the disease causing germ mutates, or changes a portion of its protein constituents. While germs that cause some diseases do not mutate, meaning that if you have immunized yourself to these diseases you have immunity from it for life, others mutate often. For example, germs that cause measles, polio, and smallpox are very stable — they do not mutate over time and therefore once you get infected with the disease, or immunized through vaccines, you develop lifelong immunity.
However, this is not the case with germs that cause respiratory infections such as influenza, RSV, or COVID-19, which can mutate quickly through subtle changes in their proteins, rendering them immune to previous vaccines or infections. It is because of these mutations that people need to take booster doses or new vaccines. The ability to create vaccines that provide long-term immunity is the holy Grail for vaccinologists.
The new study could help scientists identify the part of the virus or bacteria that cannot or does not change. After identifying this portion scientists can then create one-time vaccines that last longer and do not require boosters when the germs mutate. Another stumbling block in effective immunization is that antibodies created in the body can last anywhere from months to decades, creating a variability of immune response and longevity
By studying the cells within the body that, as a response to vaccines, create an antibody shield, the scientists were able to understand what allows these antibody-producing cells to last as long as they do. They found evidence of markers that indicate the longevity of an antibody-producing cell. But this study was only part of the answer to developing long-lasting vaccines.
Other studies have shown that booster doses given for continued protection also create better quality antibodies in a process called affinity maturation. Combining their work on the survival of cells that secrete antibodies, with other science on how antibodies get better as the response progresses, the researchers hope to create vaccines that work longer, even in people who have compromised immune systems. The new research could also provide answers to some of the hardest diseases to prevent, such as HIV, cancer, tuberculosis, and others.
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