Genetics play an important role in how our bodies respond to vaccines and booster shots, suggesting that certain protective responses elicited by vaccination could be more effective with personalization, according to a new study.

The team also identified a particular form of an antibody-related gene that predicts, at a population level, whether boosting to produce more antibodies will be effective for increasing innate immune responses.

«What’s most interesting with this work is the concept of personalized variability and understanding direct links between vaccine responses and different genes people have,» said Kelly Arnold, U-M assistant professor of biomedical engineering and senior author of the paper in Frontiers in Immunology.

The study explored how people may respond differently to conventional boosting, which reexposes the immune system to the virus (or some portion of it) to increase antibody concentration.

However, in some people, the increase in antibody concentration may not matter as much because their genes encode for immune receptors that aren’t as good at sticking to the antibodies — they’re said to have a lower affinity.

As a result, a person can have a respectable antibody count and still have a poor immune response. So one theoretical alternate immune-boosting route could be to design vaccines that tweak the structure of the antibodies — making those antibodies more likely to stick to a person’s immune cell receptors.

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Materials provided by University of Michigan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.