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For some autoimmune diseases, skin problems are among the first symptoms. They are among the least understood conditions in medicine—but hopes are high for future treatments.

An analysis of blood serum from 101 individuals from the Dominican Republic showed that omicron infection produced no neutralizing antibodies among those who received the standard two-shot regimen of the Sinovac vaccine. Antibody levels against omicron rose among those who had also received a booster shot of the mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech.

Nine Internal Medicine Researchers Recognized as Most-Cited

Recently, I was part of a team of researchers who, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health in the Dominican Republic, tested plasma samples from participants in the Dominican Republic who had received two doses of the CoronaVac COVID-19 vaccine (an inactivated virus vaccine), plus an mRNA booster shot. We also tested plasma samples from volunteers in the United States who had received the primary series of an mRNA vaccine.

Vishwa Deep Dixit, DVM, PhD, the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Comparative Medicine and Immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine, will be appointed as Director of the Yale Center for Research on Aging (Y-Age) and Professor of Pathology on January 1, 2022.

Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, discusses her lab's finding that intranasal vaccinations, by triggering immune properties of mucosal membranes, may offer better protection against respiratory viruses than injected vaccines.

The entire field of inflammation biology is transforming as immunobiologists realize that the phenomenon is much more pervasive than originally thought.

Why do 80 to 90% of people infected with COVID-19 experience only mild cases while 10 to 20% face more severe or life-threatening symptoms? Researchers in the lab of Yale’s Richard Flavell decided to pose this question to a “humanized mice” and revealed that the causes of severe COVID may lie in our own antiviral inflammatory response to the virus, the researchers report Dec. 17 in the journal Nature Biotechnology, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-01155-4. “Early in the course of disease, a strong immune response is crucial for survival,” Sefik said. “Later in the disease, it can be fatal.” The humanized mice models might also reveal strong clues to the causes and potential treatments of so-called long and severe COVID, the scientists said. The research was done in collaboration with Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki, Craig Wilen, Yuval Kluger, Eric Meffre, and Stephanie Halene.