Early Immune Hypoactivation and Persistent Innate Reprogramming Characterize Chronic Chikungunya Disease

Abstract

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infection causes acute febrile illness and debilitating arthralgia, with up to 40-80% of patients developing chronic chikungunya disease characterized by persistent arthralgia and fatigue lasting months to years. The immunological mechanisms underlying this transition remain poorly understood. We performed longitudinal immune profiling of CHIKV-infected patients stratified by clinical outcome. Single-cell RNA sequencing of peripheral blood mononuclear cells collected during acute infection and six months post-infection was combined with multiplex plasma cytokine and flow cytometric analysis. Patients who later developed chronic symptoms were characterized by early innate immune hypoactivation during acute infection, characterized by reduced monocyte and dendritic cell frequencies, lower circulating IFN-, IL-6 and IL-8, and reduced antigen-presentation and interferon-associated transcriptional programs. This was accompanied by diminished adaptive immune activation, including reduced IL-17 and IL-21 and lower HLA-DR expression across multiple T-cell subsets. Cell-cell communication analysis further indicated impaired acute monocyte-centered immune coordination in chronic progressors, whereas non-chronic patients displayed stronger monocyte-driven innate-to-adaptive signaling. By six months, chronic patients showed persistent innate remodeling, including increased non-classical monocytes, altered plasmacytoid dendritic cell and natural killer cell transcriptional programs, elevated CXCL10, reduced IL-6 and MMP8, and emergence of NK-centered predicted communication networks. Longitudinal transcriptomic analysis further identified divergent immune recovery trajectories, most prominently in non-classical monocytes and plasmacytoid dendritic cells. Together, these findings suggest that chronic chikungunya disease is associated with early innate immune hypoactivation followed by persistent innate immune remodeling, providing insight into immune mechanisms that may contribute to post-viral chronic inflammatory syndromes.