Functional and dysfunctional human CD4 T cell and B cell responses to bacteria and viruses

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

PROJECT SUMMARY Overall Component Vaccines are one of the most cost effective and extraordinarily successful medical interventions. Most of those vaccines depend on CD4 T+ cells and their help to B cells. Our understanding of in vivo, specific human CD4+ T cell responses to pathogens remains hazy, due to the complexity of the biology, the rarity of the cells, relatively inaccessible tissue localization, and technical challenges of identifying specific CD4+ T cells. Therefore, our approach to this serious problem has been to develop multiple new techniques to study human CD4+ T cells over the past several years. While CD4+ T cell-dependent antibody responses have been the source of protection for most licensed vaccines (Project 1), there is a very good argument to be made that many of the diseases for which we do not have successful vaccines require adaptive immune responses beyond antibodies for protection (Projects 2 and 3). The three Projects proposed here vigorously pursue an understanding of the mechanisms regulating human anti-pathogen CD4+ T cells, linked by new experimental approaches.