WIKICOMMONS, LANCE CPL. KHOA PELCZAR Following a concerted H1N1 vaccination campaign throughout Europe in 2009, children immunized with GlaxoSmithKline’s Pandemrix vaccine, but not Novartis’s Focetria, were at an increased risk of developing narcolepsy. In support of an autoimmune hypothesis about the connection between the chronic sleep disorder and the vaccine, Stanford neurologist and immunologist Lawrence Steinman, rheumatologist Sohail Ahmed, formerly of Novartis Vaccines in Italy, and their colleagues identified an influenza peptide that resembled a brain receptor peptide found in higher abundance in Pandemrix than in Focetria.
The peptide, from a portion of the influenza virus nucleoprotein A that is exposed on the protein’s surface, turns out to have homology to a surface-exposed peptide in a human receptor that normally binds hypocretin, the hormone that helps keep people awake. The researchers also found more antibodies that bound both the peptide and the hypocretin receptor in the blood of patients who were vaccinated with Pandemrix than in the blood of Focetria-vaccinated individuals. The results suggest that the vaccine may trigger an autoimmune reaction that leads to narcolepsy, but concrete evidence of a vaccine-narcolepsy connection remains to be found. The results are published today (July 1) in Science Translational Medicine.
That exposure to influenza virus nucleoprotein—either from the Pandemrix vaccine or a flu infection—results ...
