Variation by lineage in serum antibody responses to influenza B virus infections

Yiu Chung Lau; Ranawaka A P M Perera; Vicky J Fang; Long Hei Luk; Daniel K W Chu; Peng Wu; Ian G Barr; J S Malik Peiris; Benjamin J Cowling

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0241693

Variation by lineage in serum antibody responses to influenza B virus infections

PLoS One. 2020 Nov 9;15(11):e0241693. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0241693. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control, School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
² World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
³ Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
⁴ HKU-Pasteur Research Pole, School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.

Abstract

Two lineages of influenza B virus currently co-circulate and have distinct antigenicity, termed Victoria and Yamagata after the B/Victoria/2/87 and B/Yamagata/16/88 strains, respectively. We analyzed antibody titer dynamics following PCR-confirmed influenza B virus infection in a longitudinal community-based cohort study conducted in Hong Kong from 2009-2014 to assess patterns in changes in antibody titers to B/Victoria and B/Yamagata viruses following infections with each lineage. Among 62 PCR-confirmed cases, almost half had undetectable hemagglutination inhibition (HAI) antibody titers to the lineage of infection both pre-infection and post-infection. Among those infected with influenza B/Victoria who showed an HAI titer response after infection, we found strong rises to the lineage of infection, positive but smaller cross-lineage HAI titer boosts, a small dependence of HAI titer boosts on pre-infection titers, and a shorter half-life of HAI titers in adults. Our study is limited by the low HAI sensitivity for non-ether-treated IBV antigen and the incapacity of performing other assays with higher sensitivity, as well as the mismatch between the B/Yamagata lineage circulating strain and the assay strain in one of the study seasons.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adolescent
Child
Child, Preschool
Cohort Studies
Humans
Influenza B virus / pathogenicity*
Influenza, Human / virology*
Models, Theoretical

Grants and funding

This study was funded by the Food and Health Bureau of the Hong Kong SAR Government to the Centre for Health Protection (grant nos. CHP-CE-03, 11100882 and 13120602), and the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project no. T11-705/14N). The funding bodies had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, preparation of the manuscript, or the decision to publish.