Background
Th17 cells are IL-17 producing CD4-T cells which play a vital role in inflammatory responses, antimicrobial defense and autoimmunity. However, the involvement of Th17 cells in HIV-1 infection especially in subtype-C is not yet identified. Thus through this study we try to dissect the role of Th17 cells in HIV-1 subtype ‘C’ infection.
Methods
31 HIV seropositive antiretroviral therapy naïve and 8 HIV uninfected healthy control subjects were recruited and characterized as being early, late or slow progressor. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells were isolated from each study subject and stimulated with HIV-1 subtype ‘C’ gag peptide pool and assessed for IL-17 cytokine producing CD4-T cells using intracellular cytokine staining. All clinical groups were statistically compared by Kruskal-Wallis test and Spearman’s correlation coefficient was calculated for correlation of different variables.
Results
Here we reported that both frequency and functionality of HIV-1 specific Th17 cells were induced in early and slow progressors but were significantly reduced (p<0.001) at late stage of infection in peripheral blood. Also a significant negative correlation (ρ=0.55; P=0.0004) was observed between HIV-1 plasma viral load and gag specific %IL-17 production via CD4-T cells.
Conclusion
This study showcases a comprehensive picture of Th17 cellular dynamics in HIV-1 subtype-C infection. Further, our data establishes that higher frequencies of HIV specific Th17 cells correlates with better control of viral replication and can be used as immune correlate of protection.
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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Vajpayee, M., Singh, A., Ali, S.A. et al. Immunodynamics of Th17 cells in HIV-1 subtype ‘C’ infection. BMC Infect Dis 12 (Suppl 1), O3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-12-S1-O3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-12-S1-O3