Fig. 2.
Cellular immune response in haemodialysed individuals after vaccination with Pfizer BNT162b2.
Whole blood from vaccinated controls (red circles, n=34), individuals on maintenance haemodialysis (blue circles, n=71) and haemodialysed individuals on immunosuppressive medication (yellow circles, n=10) 21 days post second vaccination was ex vivo stimulated using a SARS-CoV-2 Spike S1-specific peptide pool. Supernatant fractions were analysed by interferon γ release assay (IGRA, a) or bead-based multiplex-cytokine assay for CCL-2 (b), IL-8 (c), TNFα (d), IL-2 (e) and IL-1β (f). Data is shown in mIU/mL for IGRA or pg/mL for the multiplex-cytokine assay. T-cells were classified as reactive if IFNγ was >200 mIU/mL. IGRA (a) was carried out with samples from all study participants. Bead based-cytokine measurements (b-f) were performed with samples from 29 control, 42 haemodialysed and 8 haemodialysed individuals on immunosuppressive medication. Samples that were classified as above upper or below the lower limit of detection of the cytokine assay or the IGRA are shown at the respective limit. Boxes represent the median, 25th and 75th percentiles, whiskers show the largest and smallest non-outlier values. Outliers were determined by 1·5 times IQR. Statistical significance was calculated by Mann-Whitney-U (two-sided). Significance was defined as *<0·01, **<0·001, ***<0·0001 or n.s.>0·01.