Four vaccines have been approved to date by the European Medicines Agency for the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, with all four being targeted to adults over 18 years of age. One way to protect the younger population such as infants or younger children until pediatric vaccines are licensed is through passive immunity via breastfeeding. Recent evidence points to the fact that human milk contains immunoglobulins (Ig) against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, both after natural infection or vaccination, but it is not known whether these antibodies can resist enzymatic degradation during digestion in the infant gastrointestinal (GI) tract or indeed protect the consumers. Here, we describe our preliminary experiments where we validated commercially available ELISA kits to detect IgA and IgG antibodies in human milk from two lactating mothers vaccinated with either the Pfizer/BioNTech or the Astra Zeneca vaccine, and the effect of a static in vitro digestion protocol on the IgA and IgG concentrations. Our data, even preliminary, provide an indication that the IgA antibodies produced after vaccination with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine resist the gastric phase but are degraded during the intestinal phase of infant digestion, whereas the IgGs are more prone to degradation in both phases of digestion. We are in the process of recruiting more individuals to further evaluate the vaccine-induced immunoglobulin profile of breastmilk, and the extent to which these antibodies can resist digestion in the infant GI tract.
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