Covid-19, discovered how to improve vaccine efficacy in kidney transplant patients
People who have had a kidney transplant need to be even more careful than everyone else when it comes to Covid-19
They are a very fragile population and have a higher risk of developing severe forms of coronavirus infection.
Vaccination is strongly recommended for them too, but the anti-rejection therapies they have to take on a daily basis seem to reduce the vaccine’s effectiveness.
Researchers at the Policlinico di Milano contributed to a study that focused on this problem, and found that patients treated with a particular immunosuppressant drug developed a better production of anti-Covid-19 antibodies and a better T-cell-mediated response after the vaccine than those using other therapies.
A finding that could allow doctors to better modulate anti-rejection treatments, so as not to expose kidney transplant patients to further fragility
The study has just been published in the American Journal of Transplantation, with the participation of Giuseppe Castellano, director of Nephrology, Dialysis and Kidney Transplantation at the Policlinico di Milano, along with his colleagues from the University of Foggia and the University of Bari.
“Kidney transplant patients are a very fragile population,” explains Castellano, who is also Professor of Nephrology at the University of Milan, “and they are at high risk of developing severe forms of disease related to SARS-CoV-2 infection, with a high mortality rate compared to the general population.
By studying the antibody and cell-mediated response to the Pfizer-BioNTech anti-Covid-19 vaccine in more than 130 kidney transplant patients, we found that people treated with immunosuppressive drugs called ‘mTOR pathway inhibitors’ developed a better response in terms of both antibody and cell-mediated T-lymphocyte production”.
These results, Castellano concludes, “offer an important explanation of the mechanisms that make transplanted patients unresponsive to anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, and open the way to an innovative use of m-TOR inhibitors as modulators of the immune response in transplanted patients, both against Covid-19 and other viral infections”.
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