JAX lab lands $2.3M grant for elderly pneumonia research

A professor from Jackson Laboratory was awarded a four-year, $2,348,313 grant from the National Institute on Aging to fund the development of new prevention and treatments for pneumococcal pneumonia, the most common form of bacterial pneumonia, in the elderly.

The two currently approved pneumococcal vaccines, Pneumovax and Prevnar, have been used with mixed success in elderly populations, according to the Bar Harbor-based lab.

A study of healthy elderly volunteers and their immune cell types will provide the baseline for understanding the functional alterations associated with healthy immune aging and responsiveness to vaccines.

George Kuchel, the study's co-investigator and director of the Center on Aging at UConn Health Center, will oversee research staff who will administer two pneumococcal vaccines to volunteers, collect blood samples several times and assess pneumococcal-specific antibody responses.

The lab of Jacques Banchereau, who was awarded the funding, will use the results of these studies to create functional, transcriptional and epigenetic profiles of elderly blood immune cells linked with antibody responses to pneumococcal vaccination. That involves looking at changes in the body caused by modifying the way genes are expressed rather than changing the genetic code itself.

“The declining ability of the aging immune system to combat infection is a major threat to the health, independence and survival of older adults,” Banchereau said in a statement. “We propose to investigate the aging immune system in the context of pneumococcal vaccines, which are designed to protect against streptococcus pneumoniae infection, but have limited efficacy for reasons that are largely unknown.”

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