Artificial lymphoid organs could help predict efficacy of booster vaccines

Researchers at the Institut Pasteur in France have developed artificial “lymphoid organ-chips” that recreate much of the human immune system’s response to booster vaccines. The technology, described in an article to be published September 6 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), could potentially be used to evaluate the likely effectiveness of new protein and mRNA-based booster vaccines for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The rapid mutation and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses means that booster vaccines must be developed equally rapidly to provide protection from emerging viral strains. The effectiveness of updated vaccines can be hard to predict, however. The recent bivalent mRNA COVID vaccine, for example, turned out to be no more effective than the original monovalent vaccine against the emerging Omicron variant that it was designed to combat. One reason for this unpredictability is that the laboratory animals used to test new vaccines have slightly different immune...