Analysis of CD8+ T cell quality in Hepatitis C using novel MHC peptide tetramers.

丙型肝炎病毒（HCV）感染了全球近2亿人。一旦被感染，身体就会产生免疫反应，这是非常成功的。有时免疫反应可以清除病毒，但在大多数情况下，它不能这样做，病毒可以继续导致严重的肝损伤。免疫反应的质量可能决定感染的结果。质量的一个方面是关键免疫细胞（T细胞）对少量病毒的敏感性-更敏感的细胞可能在控制病毒方面更有效。我们已经开发了新的方法来测量不同人群的T细胞质量，包括接受HCV实验疫苗的健康志愿者。我们的目标是创建一组新的四聚体，专门用于识别不同供体中的高质量和低质量细胞，并研究这些细胞如何与感染结果相关，或随时间变化。通过这样做，我们希望能够更好地理解为什么有些人清除了病毒，而另一些人却没有，并在未来设计出更好的疫苗或免疫治疗方法。

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infects nearly 200 million people worldwide. Once infected the body mounts an immune response, which is variably successful. Sometimes the immune response can clear the virus, however in most cases it fails to do so and the virus can then go on to cause severe liver damage. The quality of the immune response may determine the outcome of the infection. One aspect of the quality is how sensitive the key immune cells (T cells) are to low amounts of virus - the more sensitive cells might be more efficient in controlling the virus. We have developed new methods for measuring the quality of T cells in different people, including healthy volunteers receiving an experimental vaccine against HCV. We aim to create a panel of new tetramers, specially designed to identify the high and low quality cells in different donors, and look at how these correlate with the outcome of infection, or change over time. In doing this we hope to be able to better understand why some people clear the virus and others do not, and also to design better vaccines or immune treatments in the future.