What happens to your T cells after vaccination when you have lymphoma?

A team in Italy and Antwerp just published a study in Frontiers in Immunology asking a question that matters for a lot of immunocompromised patients: do lymphoma patients actually build any T cell protection after COVID-19 vaccination, even when they never develop antibodies?

Most of these patients don't seroconvert after vaccination. So by standard measures, they look unprotected. But antibody tests only tell part of the story.

To go deeper, the researchers used DETECT to identify which T cell clones in the blood specifically recognised the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein and tracked how those clones expanded and diversified over six months.

The result: lymphoma patients do mount some T cell response, but far less diverse and far less robust than healthy individuals. Something you'd never see from antibody tests alone.

DETECT wasn't a supporting tool in this analysis. It was what made the key finding possible.