Exploring the impact of immune ageing on response to infectious diseases in older people.

The COVID19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of older individuals to suffer more severe disease outcomes from infectious respiratory diseases, with COVID19 having an estimated 8-20% fatality rate in those aged >70 years (compared to ≈0.8% for influenza A). This suggests an altered immunological response to respiratory infections like COVID19 in older individuals, which leaves them dangerously susceptible to severe disease outcomes. We hypothesise this may be due to innate immune training, where aged individuals exhibit chronic inflammation and immune dysfunction mediated by epigenetic and functional reprogramming of cells in response to previous pathogen exposure. This can result in inflammatory cells such as monocyte and macrophages ‘over-reacting’ to pathogen challenge, contributing to a hyper-inflammatory state that potentiates lung damage and disease severity. These pathogenic processes are not well understood, and there are currently no therapeutic strategies which have broad efficacy in preventing severe respiratory diseases in the aged. This project aims to better understand how immune cells from older individuals respond to challenge with pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 and will explore the potential of a novel anti-inflammatory molecule to inhibit damaging inflammatory responses by immune cells from aged individuals. This is a laboratory-based project which involves the following techniques: cell culture, flow cytometry, qPCR, Luminex-based immuno-assays, ELISAs, statistical analysis.