Chennai: Vaccine candidates for Covid-19 should elicit a broad immune response that includes antibodies, and the body’s helper and killer T cells, a study has said.
It further said weak or uncoordinated immunity may lead to a poor disease outcome. The research, published in the journal Cell, confirms that a multi-layered, virus-specific immune response is important for controlling the novel coronavirus during the acute phase of the infection and reducing Covid-19 disease severity.
The sudy’s senior author Shane Crotty from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in the US, said, “Our observations could also explain why older COVID-19 patients are much more vulnerable to the disease.”
Crotty added, “With increasing age, the reservoir of T cells that can be activated against a specific virus declines and the body’s immune response becomes less coordinated, which looks to be one factor making older people drastically more susceptible to severe or fatal.”