5 ms·
If you never had dengue before, wouldn’t you always have the same response due to vaccine mediated original antigenic sin?
by mise_en_place 5y ago
If you never had dengue before, wouldn’t you always have the same response due to vaccine mediated original antigenic sin?
- refurb 5y agoIt’s been a while since my immunology courses, but I’ll give it a go. Antibody response is not necessarily the same, even in the same person with the same antigen. The immune system basically creates a ton of random antibodies and when they “hit” on the previously unseen antigen, they are amplified. Now once someone has had an immune response and generated memory cells, then yes, very similar antigens (that somewhat bind to the exist ones the body made prior) will tend to “narrow down” the antibodies generated to varieties of the original one (the immune system basically says ‘these old antibodies are close, so let’s create variation off them to optimize the new ones’). Then the other thing to consider is that there are different strains of dengue - so you could get type A, generate a response, but then exposed to type B where your type A antibodies activate the infection mechanism rather than disable it.