title: Estimating in vivo death rates of targets due to CD8 T-cell-mediated killing.
abstract: Despite recent advances in immunology, several key parameters determining virus dynamics in infected hosts remain largely unknown. For example, the rate at which specific effector and memory CD8 T cells clear virus-infected cells in vivo is hardly known for any viral infection. We propose a framework to quantify T-cell-mediated killing of infected or peptide-pulsed target cells using the widely used in vivo cytotoxicity assay. We have reanalyzed recently published data on killing of peptide-pulsed splenocytes by cytotoxic T lymphocytes and memory CD8 T cells specific to NP396 and GP276 epitopes of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) in the mouse spleen. Because there are so many effector CD8 T cells in spleens of mice at the peak of the immune response, NP396- and GP276-pulsed targets are estimated to have very short half-lives of 2 and 14 min, respectively. After the effector numbers have diminished, i.e., in LCMV-immune mice, the half-lives become 48 min and 2.8 h for NP396- and GP276-expressing targets, respectively. Analysis of several alternative models demonstrates that the estimates of half-life times of peptide-pulsed targets are not affected when changes are made in the model assumptions. Our report provides a unifying framework to compare killing efficacies of CD8 T-cell responses specific to different viral and bacterial infections in vivo, which may be used to compare efficacies of various cytotoxic-T-lymphocyte-based vaccines.
authors.affiliation: Theoretical Biology, Utrecht University, Padualaan 8, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands. vitaly.ganusov@gmail.com
authors.forename: Vitaly V
authors.initials: VV
authors.lastname: Ganusov
authors.forename: Rob J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: De Boer
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D018414:CD8-Positive T-Lymphocytes / Q000276:immunology*; D016923:Cell Death; D003602:Cytotoxicity, Immunologic; D007156:Immunologic Memory; D008217:Lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus / Q000276:immunology; D051379:Mice; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D013154:Spleen / Q000276:immunology