ABSTRACT
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the urgent need for effective preventive vaccination to reduce burden and spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in humans. Intranasal vaccination is an attractive strategy to prevent COVID-19 as the nasal mucosa represents the first-line barrier to SARS-CoV-2 entry before viral spread to the lung. Although SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development is rapidly progressing, the current intramuscular vaccines are designed to elicit systemic immunity without conferring mucosal immunity. Here, we show that AdCOVID, an intranasal adenovirus type 5 (Ad5)-vectored vaccine encoding the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, elicits a strong and focused immune response against RBD through the induction of mucosal IgA, serum neutralizing antibodies and CD4+ and CD8+ T cells with a Th1-like cytokine expression profile. Therefore, AdCOVID, which promotes concomitant systemic and local mucosal immunity, represents a promising COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) combined with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) frequently occurred. In this study, we aimed at exploring the prognostic significance of blood neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) in these types of patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Between June 30, 2010 and August 30, 2017, 1454 patients with CVD were enrolled in this study. Kaplan and Meier methodology was used for survival analysis. We also used propensity score matching (PSM) to further compare survival in patients with or without T2DM. RESULTS: Among all patients, we applied ROC curve analysis to stratify all patients into two different groups including NLR >2.5 (n=432) and NLR≤ 2.5 (n=1022) groups. After that, we further performed survival analysis between different groups. We found that patients with NLR ≤2.5 had significantly favorable OS compared with the overall survival in patients with NLR >2.5. We further built the PSM using 242 pairs of patients who have CVD and with or without T2DM. After adjusting for competing risk factors, we performed Cox proportional hazards models to identify the independent prognostic factors in multivariable adjustment. We found that NLR ≤2.5 (HR: 2.576, 95% CI: 1.241-4.583, P =0.001) and extent of coronary artery disease (HR: 2.432, 95% CI: 1.189-4.392, P =0.005) remained independent predictors of OS. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, we have established an PSM model and found that a high NLR value was an independent prognostic factor for survival, predicting in patients with both CAD and T2DM. The NLR value would be a valuable biomarker to evaluate the outcomes of patients and give them opportunities for choosing alternative therapies.
