A third SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine dose in people receiving hemodialysis overcomes B cell defects but elicits a skewed CD4 + T cell profile

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Cellular immune defects associated with suboptimal responses to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination in people receiving hemodialysis (HD) are poorly understood. We longitudinally analyzed antibody, B cell, CD4 + and CD8 + T cell vaccine responses in 27 HD patients and 26 low-risk control individuals (CI). The first two doses elicit weaker B cell and CD8 + T cell responses in HD than in CI, while CD4 + T cell responses are quantitatively similar. In HD, a third dose robustly boosts B cell responses, leads to convergent CD8 + T cell responses and enhances comparatively more Thelper (T H ) immunity. Unsupervised clustering of single-cell features reveals phenotypic and functional shifts over time and between cohorts. The third dose attenuates some features of T H cells in HD (TNFα/IL-2 skewing), while others (CCR6, CXCR6, PD-1 and HLA-DR overexpression) persist. Therefore, a third vaccine dose is critical to achieve robust multifaceted immunity in hemodialysis patients, although some distinct T H characteristics endure.