Comparative analysis of adaptive immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in infected children and adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background SARS-CoV-2 infection in children is most often mild and resembles that of seasonal coronaviruses. Profiling the adaptive immune response following infection may help to inform on the protective mechanisms mediating immunity in children and adults. Methods Humoral and cell-mediated immune responses from unvaccinated pediatric and adult participants were analyzed following non-Omicron SARS-CoV-2 infection. Specific T cell memory responses were investigated by quantifying interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) secreting cells after stimulation with ancestral and variant strains of SARS-CoV-2 and seasonal human β-coronaviruses (HCoV)-OC43 and -HKU1. Results Twenty-eight children (3–17 [median = 10] years) and 28 adults (19–62 [median = 42] years) were sampled at a mean time of 7 months (±2.8 months) after SARS-CoV-2 infection. Antibody levels against spike (S) and the receptor-binding domain (RBD), as well as neutralization capacity, were equivalent in adults and children. However, children displayed a lower number of IFN-γ secreting T cells in response to SARS-CoV-2 compared to adults, with a median of 88 [28–184] spot-forming units (SFU) per million of cells in children compared to 208 [141–340] in adults ( P < 0.001). In children, the IFN-γ + responses to SARS-CoV-2 were of similar magnitude as the responses to seasonal β-coronaviruses ( P > 0.05). In contrast, adults exhibited heightened T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 than they did to HCoV-OC43 (median of 80 [45–135] SFU/10 6 cells, P < 0.0001) and HCoV-HKU1 (median of 98 [59–151] SFU/10 6 cells, P < 0.01). Conclusions In children, the functional T cell memory responses to SARS-CoV-2, assessed through IFN-γ secretion in response to peptide stimulation, are comparable to those of HCoVs and lower compared to adults. Impact While binding and neutralizing antibody levels to SARS-CoV-2 are largely comparable in children and adults, the strength of memory T cell responses induced by infection is reduced in children compared to adults. Adults present heightened cellular memory responses to SARS-CoV-2, but not to seasonal β-coronaviruses HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1. In contrast, children’s T cell memory responses to SARS-CoV-2 closely mirror their response to common seasonal β-coronaviruses.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".