Transfusion Medicine

Rotavirus infects mature enterocytes of the small intestine of young children and cause gastroenteritis, leading to approximately 500 000 deaths annually worldwide, 85 % of which occur in the developing world. The main objectives of the thesis were to investigate host genetic factors leading to differential susceptibility to rotavirus infections and to develop an antibody-based oral therapy against the infections. Reduced TLR3 expression was previously suggested to be associated with susceptibility to rotavirus infections. In Paper I, we thus investigated rotavirus-specific IgG antibody responses from individuals (IgA competent or deficient) using two TLR3 SNPs (rs3775291 and rs5743305). We concluded that these tw