Publications by authors named "Elizabeth K Garabedian"

Article Synopsis
  • The CDC and ACIP endorse COVID-19 vaccination for patients with inborn errors of immunity (IEI), but there's limited knowledge on its safety and impact on infection severity in these patients.
  • A study involving a registry of 1,245 IEI patients across 24 countries was conducted to gather data on vaccination frequency, safety, and effectiveness, revealing that 64.7% were vaccinated, primarily with mRNA vaccines.
  • Results showed that vaccinated patients had significantly lower hospitalization and ICU admission rates when infected with COVID-19, indicating that vaccination is both safe and effective in reducing the severity of the disease in IEI patients.
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Purpose: There are currently more than 480 primary immune deficiency (PID) diseases and about 7000 rare diseases that together afflict around 1 in every 17 humans. Computational aids based on data mining and machine learning might facilitate the diagnostic task by extracting rules from large datasets and making predictions when faced with new problem cases. In a proof-of-concept data mining study, we aimed to predict PID diagnoses using a supervised machine learning algorithm based on classification tree boosting.

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Rationale: Eosinophilic gastrointestinal disorders (EGID), including eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), are inflammatory disorders of the gastrointestinal mucosa mediated by complex immune mechanisms. Although there have been initial reports of EGID in patients with inborn errors of immunity (IEI), little is known about the presentation of EGID in immunodeficient individuals.

Methods: We queried the U.

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The earliest conceptual history of gene therapy began with the recognition of DNA as the transforming substance capable of changing the phenotypic character of a bacterium and then as the carrier of the genomic code. Early studies of oncogenic viruses that could insert into the mammalian genome led to the concept that these same viruses might be engineered to carry new genetic material into mammalian cells, including human hematopoietic stem cells (HSC). In addition to properly engineered vectors capable of efficient safe transduction of HSC, successful gene therapy required the development of efficient materials, methods, and equipment to procure, purify, and culture HSC.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Results showed that AK2 deficiency and a null IL2RG mutation led to early T-cell development blocks, while a missense IL2RG mutation allowed for some maturation despite lower cell numbers.
  • * The ATO system proves useful in distinguishing between hematopoietic and thymic defects in T-cell deficiency and identifying specific stages where T-cell differentiation is hindered.
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Article Synopsis
  • - Omenn syndrome (OS) is characterized by severe skin and gut inflammation due to a high presence of activated T cells in tissues.
  • - A study involving 15 OS patients and a mouse model identified that activated T cells target the skin and are influenced by altered gut conditions, leading to significant inflammation.
  • - Findings suggest a connection between gut health and skin inflammation in OS, highlighting how gut issues can exacerbate skin symptoms.
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Purpose: Pulmonary manifestations are common in patients with primary immunodeficiency disorders (PIDs) but the prevalence, specific diseases, and their patterns are not well characterized.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective analysis of pulmonary diseases reported in the database of the United States Immunodeficiency Network (USIDNET), a program of the Immune Deficiency Foundation. PIDs were categorized into 10 groups and their demographics, pulmonary diagnoses and procedures, infections, prophylaxis regimens, and laboratory findings were analyzed.

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Chronic granulomatous disease (CGD), a primary immunodeficiency characterized by a deficient neutrophil oxidative burst and the inadequate killing of microbes, is well known to cause a significantly increased risk of invasive infection. However, infectious complications are not the sole manifestations of CGD; substantial additional morbidity is driven by noninfectious complications also. These complications can include, for example, a wide range of inflammatory diseases that affect the gastrointestinal tract, lung, skin, and genitourinary tract and overt autoimmune disease.

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Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome (WAS) is an X-linked immunodeficiency characterized by thrombocytopenia, eczema, and variable degrees of impaired cellular and humoral immunity. Age-dependent T-cell lymphopenia has been described in WAS, however, the diversity of the T-cell compartment over time in these patients has not been characterized. We have used complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) size distribution analysis to assess T-cell receptor (TCR) Vbeta repertoire in 13 patients with WAS.

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We previously reported on a 43-year-old patient with Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome (WAS) who experienced progressive clinical improvement and revertant T-cell mosaicism. Deletion of the disease-causing 6-bp insertion was hypothesized to have occurred by DNA polymerase slippage. We now describe 2 additional patients from the same family who also had revertant T lymphocytes that showed selective in vivo advantage.

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Somatic mosaicism because of in vivo reversion has been recently reported in a small number of patients affected with Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome (WAS). Flow cytometry analysis of WAS protein (WASP) expression has shown that these patients carried revertant cells only among T lymphocytes. Here, we have used high-resolution capillary electrophoresis to analyze genomic DNA from highly purified cells of one of these patients and detected revertant sequences also within the B-cell fraction.

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Revertant mosaicism due to true back mutations or second-site mutations has been identified in several inherited disorders. The occurrence of revertants is considered rare, and the underlying genetic mechanisms remain mostly unknown. Here we describe somatic mosaicism in two brothers affected with Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome (WAS).

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The first human gene therapy experiment begun in September 1990 used a retroviral vector containing the human adenosine deaminase (ADA) cDNA to transduce mature peripheral blood lymphocytes from patients with ADA deficiency, an inherited disorder of immunity. Two patients who had been treated with intramuscular injections of pegylated bovine ADA (PEG-ADA) for 2 to 4 years were enrolled in this trial and each received a total of approximately 10(11) cells in 11 or 12 infusions over a period of about 2 years. No adverse events were observed.

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