Priming and stimulation of hepatitis C virus-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells against HCV antigens NS4, NS5a or NS5b from HCV-naive individuals: implications for prophylactic vaccine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a devastating human pathogen, yet there is no vaccine available for this virus. From studies with acute or chronic HCV-infected humans and chimpanzees, T-cell responses against HCV-derived conserved non-structural antigens have been correlated with viral clearance. In this study, recombinant adenoviral vectors containing HCV-derived NS4, NS5a or NS5b genes were employed to endogenously express the HCV antigens in human dendritic cells (DCs). The DCs expressing these HCV antigens exhibited normal phenotype and function. Intriguingly, we found that the DCs expressing HCV NS4, NS5a or NS5b antigens were able to significantly stimulate autologous T cells obtained from uninfected healthy individuals. These T cells produced various cytokines and proliferated in an HCV antigen-dependent manner. Evidence of both CD4(+) and CD8(+) T-cell responses generated in vitro against HCV NS4, NS5a or NS5b were obtained. HCV NS4 was much less stimulatory for CD4(+) and CD8(+) T cells than NS5. Further, in secondary assays, the CD4(+) T cells primed in vitro exhibited HCV antigen-specific proliferative responses against recombinant protein antigens. In summary, we provide conclusive evidence of in vitro stimulation of CD4(+) and CD8(+) T cells from HCV-naive individuals against HCV antigens NS4, NS5a and NS5b. The studies with naive T cells represent early events in the induction of cellular immune responses, which most likely govern the outcome of HCV infection. These studies have significant implications in designing vaccines for HCV infection in both prophylactic and therapeutic settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".