title: Adoptive CD8 T cell control of pathogens cannot be improved by combining protective epitope specificities.
abstract: Adoptive transfer of CD8 T cells has the potential to cure infectious or malignant diseases that are refractory to conventional chemotherapy. A practically important but still unanswered question is whether mixtures of protective CD8 T cells with different epitope specificities mediate more efficient effector cell functions than do the monospecific individual CD8 T cell populations. In this study, we have addressed this issue for models of viral and bacterial infection. CD8 T cell-mediated cytotoxicity in vitro and protection in vivo were assessed to test whether CD8 T cell lines cooperate in target cell lysis and control of infection, respectively. Our data clearly show that mixtures of cytolytic T cell lines specific for different epitopes of either murine cytomegalovirus or Listeria monocytogenes do not act synergistically. An efficient anti-infectious protection thus proved to be dependent primarily on the number of transferred protective CD8 T cells rather than on the cooperative effects of multiple specificities.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Virologie, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Mainz, Germany.
authors.forename: Rafaela
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Holtappels
authors.forename: Jozef
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Janda
authors.forename: Doris
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.forename: Simone
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schenk
authors.forename: Matthias J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Reddehase
authors.forename: Gernot
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Geginat
mesh_terms: D019264:Adoptive Transfer / Q000379:methods*; D000818:Animals; D016470:Bacteremia / Q000276:immunology; D018414:CD8-Positive T-Lymphocytes / Q000637:transplantation*; D003586:Cytomegalovirus Infections / Q000276:immunology; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D018984:Epitopes, T-Lymphocyte / Q000276:immunology*; D005260:Female; D008089:Listeria monocytogenes / Q000276:immunology*; D051379:Mice; D018146:Muromegalovirus / Q000276:immunology*; D014766:Viremia / Q000276:immunology
chemical_list: D018984:Epitopes, T-Lymphocyte