Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2021 Mar;43(3):e2000200.
doi: 10.1002/bies.202000200. Epub 2020 Nov 9.

Can BCG vaccine protect against COVID-19 via trained immunity and tolerogenesis?

Preetam Basak  1 , Naresh Sachdeva  1 , Devi Dayal  2
Affiliations
Review

Can BCG vaccine protect against COVID-19 via trained immunity and tolerogenesis?

Preetam Basak et al. Bioessays. 2021 Mar.

Abstract

As the number of infections and mortalities from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic continues to rise, the development of an effective therapy against COVID-19 becomes ever more urgent. A few reports showing a positive correlation between BCG vaccination and reduced COVID-19 mortality have ushered in some hope. BCG has been suggested to confer a broad level of nonspecific protection against several pathogens, mainly via eliciting "trained immunity" in innate immune cells. Secondly, BCG has also been proven to provide benefits in autoimmune diseases by inducing tolerogenicity. Being an acute inflammatory disease, COVID-19 requires a therapy that induces early priming of anti-viral immune responses and regulates aberrant hyperactivity of innate-immune cells. Here, we hypothesize that BCG can offer reliable spatiotemporal protection from COVID-19 by triggering trained immunity and tolerogenesis, through multiple cellular pathways. We propose further research on BCG-mediated immunoprotection, especially in vulnerable individuals, as a strategy to halt the progress of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/P2D2RXfq6Vg.

Keywords: BCG; COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; epigenetic reprogramming; innate immune cells; regulatory T cells; trained immunity.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

REFERENCES

    1. Shaffer, L. (2020). 15 drugs being tested to treat COVID-19 and how they would work. Nat. Med., https://doi.org/10.1038/d41591-020-00019-9. Online ahead of print.
    1. Sheridan, C. (2020). Convalescent serum lines up as first-choice treatment for coronavirus. Nat. Biotechnol., 38(6), 655-658, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41587-020-00011-1.
    1. Li, L., Zhang, W., Hu, Yu, Tong, X., Zheng, S., Yang, J., … Liu, Z. (2020). Effect of Convalescent Plasma Therapy on Time to Clinical Improvement in Patients With Severe and Life-threatening COVID-19. JAMA, 324(5), 460, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.10044.
    1. Gharbharan, A., Jordans, C. C. E., GeurtsvanKessel, C., den Hollander, J. G., Karim, F., Mollema, F. P. N., … Rijnders, B. (2020). Convalescent Plasma for COVID-19. A randomized clinical trial. medRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.01.20139857.
    1. Agarwal, A., Mukherjee, A., Kumar, G., Chatterjee, P., & Bhatnagar, T. (2020). Convalescent plasma in the management of moderate COVID-19 in India: An open-label parallel-arm phase II multicentre randomized controlled trial (PLACID Trial). medRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.03.20187252.

MeSH terms