What Can Your Nose Do to Protect Against Illness? Plenty.

Since COVID-19 became a pandemic four years ago, we’ve all gotten a lot more experience with learning what our noses do when it comes to fighting infection and disease. A newly-published study offers a detailed look at what role the nose plays in fighting off infections — and it’s a lot more complicated than the experience of nasal swabs and rapid tests might suggest.

As the scientists behind the paper pointed out, “immune memory in the human upper airway is poorly understood.” Writing at Nature, Max Kozlov chronicled their findings — specifically, that the cells that keep our immune systems functioning rely on “the nose and upper airway” as places to learn more about possible infections. Kozlov noted that the adenoids of research participants were used to create antibodies, including some designed to combat COVID-19.

What’s especially notable here is the way that this finding contrasts with the conventional wisdom that adenoids only play a role in childhood. As Kozlov mentioned, the researchers involved with this study discovered that adenoids remained active in generating antibodies for a wide range of study partipants, some young and some old.

There’s another big reason why these findings are so useful: they suggest that administering vaccines nasally might be particularly effective. Earlier this month, ABC News cited some experts in the field who believed that a nasal vaccine would improve on the current system. “What we realized is that systemic vaccination — when we inject it and it goes through the body to build up immunity — is not as effective as generating a mucosal, or lining cell, immunity in the nose or in the lungs,” Robert Wood Johnson Medical School’s Dr. Reynold Panettieri told ABC.

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Nasal vaccines have also shown promise in halting the spread of COVID-19. A recent study of a nasal vaccine conducted by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis demonstrated positive results when tested on hamsters.
“To prevent transmission, you need to keep the amount of virus in the upper airways low,” explained Jacco Boon, PhD, who was the study’s lead author. The nose’s own capacity for building immunity goes a long way towards explaining why.