Abstract
Rubella vaccination induces widely variable immune responses in vaccine recipients. While rubella vaccination is effective at inducing immunity to rubella infection in most subjects, up to 5% of individuals do not achieve or maintain long-term protective immunity. To expand upon our previous work identifying genetic polymorphisms that are associated with these interindividual differences in humoral immunity to rubella virus, we performed a genome-wide association study in a large cohort of 1843 subjects to discover single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with rubella virus-specific cellular immune responses. We identified SNPs in the Wilms tumor protein gene (WT1) that were significantly associated (P < 5 × 10-8) with interindividual variations in rubella-specific interleukin 6 secretion from subjects' peripheral blood mononuclear cells postvaccination. No SNPs were found to be significantly associated with variations in rubella-specific interferon-γ secretion. Our findings demonstrate that genetic polymorphisms in the WT1 gene in subjects of European ancestry are associated with interindividual differences in rubella virus-specific cellular immunity after measles-mumps-rubella II vaccination.