Autoimmune-Like Mechanism in Heart Failure Enables Preventive Vaccine Therapy

Heart failure (HF) is strongly associated with inflammation. In pressure overload (PO)-induced HF, cardiac stress triggers adaptive immunity, ablation or inhibition of which blocks disease progression. We hypothesized that PO-HF might fulfill the often-used criteria of autoimmunity: if so, the associated adaptive immune response would be not only necessary but also sufficient to induce HF; it should also be possible to identify self-antigens driving the autoimmune response. Finally, we hypothesized that such an antigen-specific response can be manipulated to preventively reduce the severity of PO-HF in a tolerizing vaccine.

We used the transfer of lymphocytes or serum from PO-HF mice into healthy recipients to assess whether the adaptive response is sufficient to induce disease. We devised a novel pipeline to identify self-antigens driving the response. We immunized healthy mice with novel antigens to assess whether they induce disease. To determine whether these antigens could be present in human patients, we sought to detect existing responses against these antigens in patients with HF. Finally, we used the antigens in an oral tolerance protocol to preventively protect mice from subsequently induced PO-HF, analyzing the results with next-generation sequencing.

We found that PO-HF fulfills the criteria of an autoimmune disease, albeit partially, and identified novel cardiac self-antigens, capable of inducing cardiac dysfunction. The novel antigens in a tolerizing vaccine formulation preemptively reduced the severity of disease triggered by subsequent application of PO, via induction of effector regulatory T cells, enabling a potent reduction of PO-driven loss of systolic function, cardiac inflammation, and proinflammatory CD4⁺ T-cell clonal expansion.

We demonstrate that PO-HF is triggered by hemodynamic stress and then sets off an autoimmune-like response against cardiac self-antigens. The antigens can be used to reduce the severity of future-onset disease, via oral tolerization, effectively acting as a protective vaccine.