REVIEW article
Front. Immunol.
Sec. Immunological Memory
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1680375
This article is part of the Research TopicDecoding the Spectrum of Plasma Cell Heterogeneity: Insights into Maturity and LongevityView all 3 articles
Emerging novel methodologies to understand and strategically target long-lived plasma cells in vaccine design to induce durable immunity
Provisionally accepted
- 1Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, United States
- 2Merck & Co Inc, Rahway, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Long-lived plasma cells (LLPCs) are a subset of antibody secreting cells (ASCs) that reside within lymphoid tissues, including the bone marrow (BM) and gut associated lymphoid tissues (GALT), and can secrete antigen-specific antibodies for up to decades or longer. Due to these traits, LLPCs serve as a crucial mediator for durable protective immunity. The signals needed to control the differentiation of LLPCs from naïve B cells, however, are not well understood. Accordingly, it remains a challenge to design vaccines that specifically drive LLPC generation and subsequent antibody durability. In this review, we discuss LLPC generation and heterogeneity following vaccination, vaccine design decisions known to impact immunological memory, and how novel emerging technologies can be used to inform on LLPC biology to enable LLPC targeting vaccine design.
Keywords: Long lived plasma cells, Vaccines, durability, Elispot, Ig Trap, Nanovials, Fluorescence-activatedcell sorting, Single Cell RNA sequencing
Received: 05 Aug 2025; Accepted: 07 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cusimano, Staupe and Sullivan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nicole Sullivan, nicole.sullivan@merck.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.