Co-Incubation with Core Proteins of HBV and HCV Leads to Modulation of Human Dendritic Cells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hepatitis B and C (HBV and HCV) are hepatotropic viruses in humans with approximately 350 and 170 million chronic carriers respectively. Since both viruses have similar modes of transmission, many people are co-infected. Co-infection is common in intravenous drug users, HIV-positive individuals, and transplant recipients. Compared to mono-infected patients, co-infected patients exhibit exacerbated liver cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, and liver failure. Some of the pathogenic effects may be attributed in part to the structural core proteins of both viruses-ones that have displayed immunomodulatory properties. Yet, the effects of their combined interaction on the human immune system remain a mystery. We aimed to elucidate the combined effects of HBV and HCV core proteins on human dendritic cells' (DCs) ability to present antigens and stimulate antigen-specific T-cells. We observed that when DCs, differentiated from human peripheral blood monocytes, were co-incubated with both core proteins, IL-10 production was dramatically enhanced, IL-6, TNF-α, and IL-12 production was significantly reduced, and HLA-DR expression was downregulated. This instant functional and phenotypic modulation of DCs induced by a combination of HBV and HCV core proteins can allow them to behave like tolerizing DCs, inefficiently presenting antigens to CD4+ T-cells and even suppressing induction of the cellular immune response. These results reveal an important mechanism by which HBV and HCV synergistically induce immune tolerance early in infection that may be instrumental in establishing chronic, persistent infections.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".