What is it about?
Prophylactic AIDS vaccines developed so far have limited ability to protect the host from infection, except for live(-attenuated) vaccines tested in monkeys. However, the mechanisms underlying the live vaccine-based immunodeficiency virus control have not been fully understood. In this article, we present a hypothesis that T lymphocytes in our immune system can exert parallel processing to detect very small amount of viral antigens on infected cells.
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Why is it important?
We further hypothesize that this early detection mechanism of infected cells by T cells recognizing a broad spectrum of viral antigens in parallel can be optimized by immunization with live viruses, because they persist in the host and stimulate T cells weakly and continually for a long time. The hypothesis may allow intuitive understanding of the mode of action of live vaccines, yet experimental evidences will be necessary to test it in the future.
Perspectives
This article is an attempt to understand a system, which is called the immune system, from computational/informatics points of view. The idea may be interesting not only to biomedical scientists and immunologists but to computer scientists and theorists.
Dr Tetsuo Tsukamoto
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: CD8+ Cytotoxic-T-Lymphocyte Breadth Could Facilitate Early Immune Detection of Immunodeficiency Virus-Derived Epitopes with Limited Expression Levels, mSphere, January 2019, ASM Journals,
DOI: 10.1128/msphere.00381-18.
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