Anti-influenza T cells in bronchoalveolar microenvironment of critically severe COVID-19 patients

Abstract

[...]December 13, 2021, there have been 269,468,311 confirmed infection cases and 5,304,248 deaths attributed to COVID-19 caused by SARS-COV-2 virus (https://covid19.who.int/). The rates of COVID-19 and influenza co-infection were reported to range from 0.2 to 45.7% in different COVID-19 cohorts [1]. [...]both SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses preferentially infect alveolar type 2 (AT2) cells [2]. TCR directly recognizes and interacts with the antigenic epitope, which determines the specificity of T cell response [4]. [...]the antigenic T cell response can be directly analyzed by epitope-specific TCR sequence [4]. Comparatively, patients with critical infection had positive anti-influenza T cells with an average percentage of 1.23% (Fig. 1C). [...]it is worth noting that two of eight influenza A-epitopes, GILGFVFTL and SSLENFRAYV, could elicit T cell response in critically severe COVID-19 patients.