A recent clinical trial by Novartis, in healthy elderly volunteers in Australia and New Zealand, found a variant of the drug enhanced their response to flu vaccine by 20% – our immunity to flu being something that declines with old age.
Initially, in response to flu worries, local church officials mulled over measures forbidding worshippers from kissing the reliquary containing what they believe is the blood of San Gennaro, as he is known here, a local bishop martyred in 305.
"The basic mechanism is that it is down-regulating the body's overactive immune response to flu," said Dr. Ann R. Thomas, an author of the study and a physician with the Oregon Public Health Division.
We detected a significant difference in CD8+ T cell response to Flu antigen (influenza matrix peptide Flu MP58 66), but the responses of the two cohorts to melanoma antigen were comparable.
In response to flu virus, the activity of type I and type III interferon genes was abnormally low in the patient's dendritic cells, the team reports online today in Science.
The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu.
The aforementioned study of Belz et. al. in the influenza model demonstrating both LN-resident CD8αα DC as well as migrant DC serving as APC in response to flu infection did not, however, identify the nature of migrant RDC.
However, there are no reports investigating the host response to flu infection in AS patients.
To better understand the rules of antibody generation, Altman et al. compared antibodies produced in response to flu in mice and lampreys.
However, at the end of the study, we could not detect significant differences in IFN-γ production in response to flu antigens between previously vaccinated and unvaccinated participants.
A recent short term study (6 weeks) of elderly patients given doses of a rapamycin analog found few side effects significant from placebo control subjects and reported a significant increase in serological response to flu vaccination, however, this study did not examine any markers of metabolic health in these subjects during treatment [ 31].
