Abstract
BackgroundTrypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas’ disease, is an obligate intracellular parasite which induces a CD8+ T cell immune response with secretion of cytokines and release of cytotoxic granules. Although an immune-suppressive effect of T. cruzi on the acute phase of the disease has been described, little is known about the capacity of CD8+ T cell from chronic chagasic patients to respond to a non-T. cruzi microbial antigen.MethodsIn the present paper, the frequency, phenotype and the functional activity of the CD8+ T cells specific from Flu-MP*, an influenza virus epitope, were determined in 13 chagasic patients and 5 healthy donors.ResultsThe results show that Flu-MP* peptide specific CD8+ T cells were found with similar frequencies in both groups. In addition, Flu-MP* specific CD8+ T cells were distributed in the early or intermediate/late differentiation stages without showing enrichment of a specific sub-population. The mentioned Flu-MP* specific CD8+ T cells from chagasic patients were predominately TEM (CCR7- CD62L-), producing IL-2, IFNγ, CD107a/b and perforin, and did not present significant differences when compared with those from healthy donors.ConclusionsOur results support the hypothesis that there is no CD8+ T cell nonspecific immune-suppression during chronic Chagas disease infection. Nonetheless, other viral antigens must be studied in order to confirm our findings.
Highlights
Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas’ disease, is an obligate intracellular parasite which induces a CD8+ T cell immune response with secretion of cytokines and release of cytotoxic granules
Population HLA-A2 subtyping In this work we assessed whether the CD8+ T cells from T. cruzi infected patients are able to respond to non-T. cruzi microbial antigens such as a well described epitope from influenza virus derived from the matrix protein
It was studied whether the frequency, phenotype and functional capacity of Flu-specific CD8+ T cells are modified in chronic chagasic patients with respect to healthy donors used as control
Summary
Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas’ disease, is an obligate intracellular parasite which induces a CD8+ T cell immune response with secretion of cytokines and release of cytotoxic granules. As other intracellular infectious agents, T. cruzi induces a CD8+ T cell immune response with secretion of cytokines and release of cytotoxic granules [8,9]. During the acute infection, depleted CD8+ T cells mice showed increased parasite burden in their hearts, moderate decrease in the inflammation and higher mortality compared with wild type infected animals [10]. In chronic infection, there are several experimental data supporting that the suboptimal generation of functional specific effector CD8+ T cells leads to the lack of infection control and parasite persistence in the tissues [11,12]. The presence of late-differentiated CD8+ T cells exhibiting signs of senescence that are incapable of maintaining effector functions [11,12,13], and the diversity of
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