An Animal Model of Acute and Chronic Chagas Disease With the Reticulotropic Y Strain of Trypanosoma cruzi That Depicts the Multifunctionality and Dysfunctionality of T Cells

In conclusion, during acute T. cruzi infection with the reticulotropic Y strain, immune activation leads to the generation of antigen-specific multifunctional CD4+ Th1 and CD8+ Tc1 cells and their regulation by inhibitory receptor co-expression. In contrast, during chronic T. cruzi infection, the chronicity of the infection induces a moderate inflammatory infiltrate in colon and liver tissues accompanied with poor T cell effector function that is possibly related to the co-expression of inhibitory receptors on T cells, but this phenomenon does not occur in cytotoxic CD8+ T cells. Taken together, these data support our previous study in which we hypothesized that similar to several chronic infectious diseases in humans and murine models, the T. cruzi persistence could promotes the dysfunctionality of T cells, and these changes are potentially related to the progression of ChD. Thus, these data constitute a useful model for the identification of immune markers and correlates of protection, and for long-term explorations of new immunotherapy strategies for ChD. Ethics Statement This study was performed in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC, approval FUA-007-14) from the Unidad de Biologá Comparativa (UBA) at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ, Bogotá Colombia). All animal studies were conducted in accordance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals from UBA-PUJ. Author...
Source: Frontiers in Immunology - Category: Allergy & Immunology Source Type: research