Adenovirus-specific T cells in adults are frequent, cross-reactive to common childhood adenovirus infections and boosted by adenovirus-vectored vaccines

Human adenoviruses (HAdVs) cause diverse disease presentations as pathogens, and are also used as viral vectors for vaccines and gene therapy products. Preexisting adaptive immune responses to HAdV are known to influence symptom severity, viral clearance and the success of viral vectored products. Of note, approximately 50% of the UK’s adult population has received at least one dose of a chimpanzee adenovirus vectored SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (ChAdOx1) since January 2021.

We used FluoroSpot analysis to quantify the interferon gamma (IFNγ) and interleukin-2 (IL2) responses of healthy blood donors to HAdV species A, B, C, D and F and chimpanzee adenovirus Y25, related to HAdV species E. We find that cellular immune responses to multiple species of human adenovirus are ubiquitous among healthy adult blood donors, and that stimulating PBMC with whole hexon peptide libraries induces a significantly greater IFNγ and IL2 response than using selected peptide pools alone. We then compared the cellular immune responses of ChAdOx1 recipients and control donors using PBMC collected in 2021, and found that homotypic and heterotypic IFNγ responses were significantly boosted in ChAdOx1 recipients but not controls. Finally, we show that in PBMC derived from blood donors, IFNγ responses are made to both conserved and variable regions of the hexon protein.

Future vaccination campaigns using adenoviral vectored vaccines will need to account for the pre-existing exposure of recipients to both circulating HAdVs and vaccines such as ChAdOx1, which convey polyfunctional antiviral T cell responses to even low seroprevalence HAdV types.