Abstract
There is a need for novel approaches to tackle major vaccine challenges such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV, among others. Success will require vaccines able to induce a cytotoxic T-cell response-a deficiency of most current vaccine approaches. The successful development of T-cell vaccines faces many hurdles, not least being the lack of consensus on a standardized T-cell assay format able to be used as a correlate of vaccine efficacy. Hence, there remains a need for reproducible measures of T-cell immunity proven in human clinical trials to correlate with vaccine protection. The T-cell equivalent of a neutralizing antibody assay would greatly accelerate the development and commercialization of T-cell vaccines. Recent advances have seen a plethora of new T-cell assays become available, including some like cytometry by time-of-flight with extreme multiparameter T-cell phenotyping capability. However, whether it is historic thymidine-based proliferation assays or sophisticated new cytometry assays, each assay has its relative advantages and disadvantages, and relatively few of these assays have yet to be validated in large-scale human vaccine trials. This review examines the current range of T-cell assays and assesses their suitability for use in human vaccine trials. Should one or more of these assays be accepted as an agreed surrogate of T-cell protection by a regulatory agency, this would significantly accelerate the development of T-cell vaccines.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1459-1470 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Expert Review of Vaccines |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2012 |
Keywords
- clinical trials
- CTL
- CYTOF
- ELISPOT
- flow cytometry
- T-cell assay
- vaccine