Vaccination strategies for rapid protection against multidrug-resistant bacterial infection are very important, especially for hospitalized patients who have high risk of exposure to these bacteria. However, few such vaccination strategies exist due to a shortage of knowledge supporting their rapid effect. Here, we demonstrated that a single intranasal immunization of inactivated whole cell of Acinetobacter baumannii elicits rapid protection against broad A. baumannii-infected pneumonia via training of innate immune response in Rag1-/- mice. Immunization-trained alveolar macrophages (AMs) showed enhanced TNF-α production upon restimulation. Adoptive transfer of immunization-trained AMs into naive mice mediated rapid protection against infection. Elevated TLR4 expression on vaccination-trained AMs contributed to rapid protection. Moreover, immunization-induced rapid protection was also seen in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae pneumonia models, but not in Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae model. Our data reveal that a single intranasal immunization induces rapid and efficient protection against certain Gram-negative bacterial pneumonia via training AMs response, which highlights the importance and the possibility of harnessing trained immunity of AMs to design rapid-effecting vaccine.
Keywords: Acinetobacter baumannii; Trained immunity; acinetobacter baumannii; alveolar macrophage; immunology; infectious disease; inflammation; klebsiella pneumoniae; microbiology; multidrug-resistant bacteria; pseudomonas aeruginosa; rapid effect; trained immunity; vaccine.
© 2021, Gu et al.