Immune Markers Associated with Host Susceptibility to Infection with West Nile Virus

Infections with West Nile virus (WNV) are typically asymptomatic, but some patients experience severe neurological disease and even death. Over 1500 fatalities have resulted from the more than 37,000 WNV cases in the USA between 1999 and 2012. While it is clear that age is a significant risk factor, markers of immune status associated with susceptibility to severe infections are incompletely defined. We have taken advantage of stable characteristics of individual status to profile immune markers from a stratified cohort of healthy subjects with a history of asymptomatic or severe infection with WNV. We characterized individual variations in antibody and serum cytokine levels and genome-wide transcriptional profiles of peripheral blood cells (PBMCs). While antibody levels were not significantly different between cohorts, we found that subjects with a history of severe infection had significantly lower levels of serum IL-4, and that these changes in IL-4 levels were associated with altered gene expression patterns in PBMCs. In addition, we identified a signature of 105 genes that displayed altered expression levels when comparing subjects with a history of asymptomatic or severe infection. These results suggest that systems-level analysis of immune system status can be used to identify factors relevant for susceptibility to severe infections, and specifically point to an important contribution for IL-4 in resistance to WNV infection.