Utrecht (Netherlands): It seems that every person’s immune system is different. Albert JR Heck, professor of chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Utrecht, said that my colleagues and I detected this variation in immunity after measuring antibodies in the blood of healthy and sick people. This research may explain why the COVID-19 vaccine appears to be less effective for some people. At the same time, it provides information about the possibility of identifying and obtaining particularly effective antibodies in individuals and their use in curing others.
In our daily life, our body is faced with many germs and they attack them. They cleverly enter our bodies to gain control over our bodies. Fortunately, we have a powerful defense system, our immune system. If our immune system works well, we can successfully fight off most of the germs that attack us in a persistent and aggressive manner. We have protein molecules in our arsenal called antibodies to neutralize invading germs.
To effectively deal with each germ, different weapons (antibodies) are needed. The good thing is that our body has provided billions of different antibodies, but not all of these antibodies can be made at the same time. Often certain antibodies are produced only at the time of the attack of a particular germ.
If we are infected with bacteria, we start making antibodies to attack and kill those bacteria. If we get infected with coronavirus, then we start making antibodies to neutralize that virus. Even after getting infected with the flu virus, we make other antibodies again. At one time it was not known how many different antibodies are made in the blood and how many antibodies are present in our blood. Many scientists estimated it to be more than several billion and therefore almost immeasurable.
Two surprising things
Theoretically, our bodies have the capacity to make thousands of billions of different antibodies, but the first surprise came when we saw that only a few hundred different antibodies were present in high concentrations in the bloodstream of both healthy and diseased people. We were surprised the second time, when studying these profiles from a few drops of blood, we noticed that each person’s immune system responds differently against microbes and that each person has a different antibody profile.
The concentration of these antibodies changes in a unique way during illness or after vaccination. The results may explain why some people are at higher risk of contracting the flu or coronavirus, or why they recover faster from some diseases than others. Until now, scientists used to believe that it was impossible to accurately detect highly complex mixtures of antibodies in the blood, but mass spectrometry separates substances based on their molecular structure, and since each specific antibody has a different molecular structure. , so we were able to find out the technique to measure all antibodies individually.
This method has been used to measure the antibody profile in about 100 people. These people included Covid-19 patients and people with the Covid-19 vaccine. Not even once have we found the same antibodies in two different people, even though they got the same vaccine. It is fair to say that everyone’s antibody profile is as unique as their fingerprint.
