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. 2012 May;142(6):1384-7.
doi: 10.1053/j.gastro.2012.02.010.

Will there be a vaccine to protect against the hepatitis C virus?

Benoît Callendret  1 , Christopher M Walker
Affiliations

Will there be a vaccine to protect against the hepatitis C virus?

Benoît Callendret et al. Gastroenterology. 2012 May.
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of interest

The authors disclose no conflicts.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Chronic hepatitis C is characterized by functional exhaustion of CD8+ T cells and poor neutralization of contemporaneous viruses by antibodies. Failure of these effector immune responses is almost certainly a consequence of inadequate CD4+ T-helper cell activity. Why CD4+ T-cell responses are not sustained, leading to HCV persistence, is unknown. Candidate HCV vaccines that advanced to human trials elicited effector CD8+ T cells or neutralizing antibodies, and CD4+ T-helper cells required to generate and sustain these effector responses. Here, we propose that a vaccine to prime CD4+ T cells alone will be simpler to design and produce. They also should skew the outcome of most HCV infections from persistence to resolution. It is predicted that effector immune responses will develop naturally as they do in infections that resolve spontaneously, but aided by a strong and sustained vaccine-primed CD4+ T-cell response that is much less likely to fail. The antigen requirements and cellular processing pathways that must be engaged for each vaccine type are indicated.
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