New Paper by the Oxenius Lab

Nicolas S. Baumann, Suzanne P. M. Welten , Nicole Torti, Katharina Pallmer, Mariana Borsa, Isabel Barnstorf, Jennifer D. Oduro, Luka Cicin-Sain, Annette Oxenius

PLoS Pathog. 2019 May 13;15(5):e1007785.
doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1007785. eCollection 2019 May.

Memory T cell inflation is a process in which a subset of cytomegalovirus (CMV) specific CD8 T cells continuously expands mainly during latent infection and establishes a large and stable population of effector memory cells in peripheral tissues. Here we set out to identify in vivo parameters that promote and limit CD8 T cell inflation in the context of MCMV infection. We found that the inflationary T cell pool comprised mainly high avidity CD8 T cells, outcompeting lower avidity CD8 T cells. Furthermore, the size of the inflationary T cell pool was not restricted by the availability of specific tissue niches, but it was directly related to the number of virus-specific CD8 T cells that were activated during priming. In particular, the amount of early-primed KLRG1- cells and the number of inflationary cells with a central memory phenotype were a critical determinant for the overall magnitude of the inflationary T cell pool. Inflationary memory CD8 T cells provided protection from a Vaccinia virus challenge and this protection directly correlated with the size of the inflationary memory T cell pool in peripheral tissues. These results highlight the remarkable protective potential of inflationary CD8 T cells that can be harnessed for CMV-based T cell vaccine approaches.

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