Probiotic treatment for infants
Professor David Lynn of Flinders University and SAHMRI, and his collaborators, with the support of our Bloom Research Program, will explore whether probiotics can help improve the vaccination response of infants who have received antibiotic treatment, so they are better protected against disease.
Vaccination is the best way to protect infants against infectious disease, but some infants produce lower than expected amounts of antibodies following vaccination, so may not be as well protected from disease.
Professor David Lynn, Professor of Systems Immunology at Flinders University and SAHMRI, and his collaborators, discovered that antibiotic treatment in infancy leads to lower levels of ‘good’ bacteria in the gut, and the levels of these good bacteria at the time of vaccination was linked with how well infants responded to their vaccinations.
Professor Lynn says, “When different infants get the same vaccine, some infants will produce lots of antibodies which mediate the protection against those vaccines. Other infants will produce middling levels of antibodies, and some will produce very little antibodies, and will then not be as well protected.”
“It has been a mystery for quite a while, but my group has been trying to understand the role of the microbes that live within us, and whether that can influence how well you respond to a vaccine.”
“What we have observed is that infants, particularly those that get antibiotics in the very early neonatal period, have much lower antibody responses to different vaccines.”
“And so we’re now interested in if there is a way that we can improve our gut microbiome health to boost immune responses to vaccinations.”
Funds from our Bloom Research Program will support a trial of probiotic treatment in infants who have received antibiotics, in the hope that it will restore their good bacteria, improving their vaccine response, and better protecting them against potentially deadly disease, through the team’s project titled ‘Precision Vaccinology: A randomised controlled trial to assess if a probiotic intervention leads to enhanced immune responses to vaccination in antibiotic-treated infants.’
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