Respiratory pathogens such as viruses and bacteria are a persistent threat to global health. Most current vaccines are design to recognize a pathogen-specific antigen, limiting their efficacy when new variants emerge. In a paper in Science, Zhang et al. report a vaccine strategy that provides protection against a wide range of respiratory diseases by activating the innate immune system.
The work builds on previous findings that certain vaccines can confer nonspecific protection against unrelated pathogens and that this is involves a dynamic interplay between the adaptive and innate immune systems, which the authors term integrated organ immunity. To simulate integrated organ immunity in a mucosal vaccine, the authors combined Toll-like receptor ligands 4 and 7/8 — to mimic T cell signals that stimulate innate immune cells in the lung — together with the model antigen ovalbumin to provide broad stimulation of the innate immune response, recruiting T cells into the lungs.
