Pneumococcal invasive disease preceded by intracellular replication within splenic macrophages

Abstract

During bacteremic pneumonia, the prevailing dogma is that bacteria seed from the lungs into the blood. Recently, we have shown that experimental murine sepsis is preceded by intracellular replication within splenic macrophages (Ercoli Nat Microbiol 2018), which shed into the bloodstream initiating invasive disease. Here we aimed to investigate a role for the spleen in the pathogenesis of bacteraemia following pneumonia. We analysed by confocal microscopy the fate of pneumococci during ex vivo human spleen perfusions (REC reference: 18/EM/0057), in spleens during pneumonia in non-human primates (Reyes PLOS one 2016) and mice. During ex vivohumanspleenperfusion, clusters of pneumococci were observed within macrophages and the size of bacterial clusters increased over time. To associate these infectious foci to invasive pneumococcal disease during pneumonia, we analysed spleens in a baboon pneumonia model, and detected pneumococcal clusters in splenic macrophages. To test the functional relevance of these data, we treated intranasally-challenged mice with a single, non-therapeutic sub-MIC dose of azithromycin, known to concentrate inside macrophages. Data showed that bacterial lung-counts were identical in treated and untreated mice. Untreated mice showed signs of disease, had high blood and spleen-counts, whereas mice treated with the non-therapeutic dose showed no signs of disease, had low spleen-counts and no bacteraemia. Thus, the number of pneumococci in the spleen, not the lung, correlates to blood-counts during bacterial pneumonia. We hypothesise that after initial control of invasive infection by the spleen, bacteraemia associated with pneumonia arises from a sub-set of splenic macrophages that are permissive for bacterial replication.