NEW research led by Flinders University has uncovered a link between a COVID-19 vaccine complication and a rare disease brought on by the common cold.
Vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT), which emerged following adenovirus vector-based vaccines like Oxford-AstraZeneca, were found to be caused by an unusually dangerous blood autoantibody directed against a protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4).
In 2023, researchers from Canada, North America, Germany and Italy discovered a virtually identical disorder with the same PF4 antibody that was fatal in some cases after natural adenovirus (common cold) infection.
Flinders University researchers Dr Jing Jing Wang and Flinders Professor Tom Gordon, Head of Immunology at SA Pathology (pictured), teamed up with this group of international researchers to find that the PF4 antibodies in both adenovirus infection-associated VITT and classic adenoviral vectored VITT share identical molecular fingerprints or signatures.
Professor Gordon said the findings published in New England Journal of Medicine have important implications for improving vaccine safety and development.
"These findings, using a completely new approach for targeting blood antibodies developed at Flinders University, indicate a common triggering factor on virus and vaccine structures that initiates the pathological PF4 antibodies," he explained.
"Indeed, the pathways of lethal antibody production in these disorders must be virtually identical and have similar genetic risk factors," Gordon concluded. JM
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