Vaccination with lipid core peptides fails to induce epitope-specific T cell responses but confers non-specific protective immunity in a malaria model.

Autor: Simon H Apte, Penny L Groves, Mariusz Skwarczynski, Yoshio Fujita, Chenghung Chang, Istvan Toth, Denise L Doolan
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2012
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 7, Iss 8, p e40928 (2012)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040928
Popis: Vaccines against many pathogens for which conventional approaches have failed remain an unmet public health priority. Synthetic peptide-based vaccines offer an attractive alternative to whole protein and whole organism vaccines, particularly for complex pathogens that cause chronic infection. Previously, we have reported a promising lipid core peptide (LCP) vaccine delivery system that incorporates the antigen, carrier, and adjuvant in a single molecular entity. LCP vaccines have been used to deliver several peptide subunit-based vaccine candidates and induced high titre functional antibodies and protected against Group A streptococcus in mice. Herein, we have evaluated whether LCP constructs incorporating defined CD4(+) and/or CD8(+) T cell epitopes could induce epitope-specific T cell responses and protect against pathogen challenge in a rodent malaria model. We show that LCP vaccines failed to induce an expansion of antigen-specific CD8(+) T cells following primary immunization or by boosting. We further demonstrated that the LCP vaccines induced a non-specific type 2 polarized cytokine response, rather than an epitope-specific canonical CD8(+) T cell type 1 response. Cytotoxic responses of unknown specificity were also induced. These non-specific responses were able to protect against parasite challenge. These data demonstrate that vaccination with lipid core peptides fails to induce canonical epitope-specific T cell responses, at least in our rodent model, but can nonetheless confer non-specific protective immunity against Plasmodium parasite challenge.
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