CD8(+) T Cells in Leishmania Infections: Friends or Foes?

Stäger, Simona; Rafati, Sima

As CTL responses play a pivotal role in defense against viruses and tumor cells, polytope vaccines have found their way in these fields but there is still no report on leishmaniasis even it has been shown that CTLs could be very important in protection and long-lasting resistance to infection. Recently, we took advantage of the potential of immunoinformatics tools to screen for L. major epitopes that could be presented in HLA A2, which is the most prevalent HLA supertype in the Iranian population. In vitro stimulation to recall memory CD8 + T cells from Leishmania-infected individuals and intracellular cytokine assays for IFN-γ-producing cells confirmed that HLA A2 positive individuals that recovered from an L. major infection successfully generated CD8 + T cell responses against peptides derived from LmsTI1 and LPG-3 (Seyed et al., 2011) . Furthermore, Walden and co-workers have mapped the T cell epitopes from kinetoplastid membrane protein of L. major (Kmp11) via classical mapping for different human HLA class I alleles (Basu et al., 2007) . Gazzinelli and co-workers have studied CD8 + T cell responses against the Leishmania A2 antigen and mapped the CD8 + T cell epitopes in BALB/c mice (Resende et al., 2008) . Laouini and co-workers (Guerfali et al., 2009 ) and Dumonteil and co-workers (Dumonteil, 2009 ) started genomewide screenings for novel epitopes. Using a combination of T cell epitope prediction tools, they successfully validated such epitopes in both BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice.