Abstract
Adaptive immune responses and immunopathogeneses are based on the ability of T cells to respond to specific antigens. Consequently, understanding T-cell recognition patterns in health and disease involves studying the complexity and genetic heterogeneity of the antigen recognition pathway, which includes both T-cell receptors and the antigen-presentation machinery. In this Perspective, we overview the development and use of technologies for assessing T-cell recognition in a clinical context, and discuss how knowledge of T-cell recognition pathways can be critical before, during and after disease treatment. The ability to assess T-cell-mediated immunity in individual patients during disease progression might enable the identification of patient-specific biomarkers that predict therapeutic efficacy and response. Effective strategies for the complex analysis of T-cell specificity in clinical settings are highly desirable and could complement current approaches for the monitoring of therapy responses.
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Change history
02 January 2018
In the version of this Perspective originally published, in Fig. 4, in the schematic for the DNA barcoded multimers, the barcodes were missing; they have now been included and the figure updated in all versions of the Perspective.
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Acknowledgements
The work was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), ERC starting grant and the Lundbeck Foundation fellowship (S.R.H.) and the Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN) (E.W.N.).
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S.R.H. and E.W.N. conceived and wrote this Perspective.
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E.W.N. is a board director and shareholder of immunoSCAPE Pte. Ltd. S.R.H. is a co-founder of Immumap Services.
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Hadrup, S.R., Newell, E. Determining T-cell specificity to understand and treat disease. Nat Biomed Eng 1, 784–795 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-017-0143-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-017-0143-4
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