Stefan Stevanovic: "Individual T-cell responses to swine flu and other viruses"

Prof. Stefan Stevanovic
Interfaculty Institute for Cell Biology, University of Tübingen, Germany

Individual T-cell responses to swine flu and other viruses

Cellular immunity protecting against most viral infections is mediated by CD4 and CD8 T cells. The identification of virus-derived T-cell epitopes, crucial for immunodiagnostics and immunotherapy in many cases, can be achieved by different strategies, for example,characterization of T cell lines or clones, epitope prediction, or direct elution and molecular analy-sis of HLA ligands. By mapping T-cell responses to epitopes from differ-ent common viruses, we investigate HLA-dependent and -independent immunodominance as well as long-term immunity and demonstrate a considerable degree of individuality between different donors.