INFECTION OF MURINE CELL LINES WITH RETROVIRUS HTLV-1 THROUGH CELL-FREE VIRUS CONCENTRATES

BARBÁS, MARÍA GABRIELA; BALANGERO MARCOS; BELKYS MALETTO; PISTORESI M.CRISTINA; LUJÁN HUGO; GABRIEL MORÓN; SANDRA GALLEGO

Córdoba, Argentina

Congreso; VII Congreso Latinoamericano de Inmunología; 2005

Asociación Latinoamericana de Inmunología

The main challenges in the field of the retrovirus HTLV-1 are the development of an effective vaccine for preventing HTLV-1 infection as well as the development of therapeutic vaccines for the treatment of ill individuals. The establishment of in vitro and in vivo models of HTLV-1 infection, is crucial to acomplish the development of an anti-HTLV-1 vaccine. We intend to develop and standardize new in vitro and in vivo systems for HTLV-1 infection. We successfully infected a murine cell line (EL-4) with a cell-free virus concentrate, obtained from MT-2 (HTLV-1 persistently infected human T cell line) cell-culture supernatant. Infection of cells was corroborated by IFA using anti-HTLV-1 antibodies and detecting the provirus using Nested-PCR from 24 h to at least 5 days post-inoculation. The neutralization of infection was carried out using serial 10-fold dilutions of a polyclonal serum from an asymptomatic HTLV-1 infected subject. Total neutralization was obtained at 3 hours post-inoculation. Using this cell-free virus infected murine cell lines we will intend to standardize the conditions to infect mice with HTLV-1, in order to have an in vivo model to evaluate humoral and cellular immune response against different HTLV-1 peptides and to assess the protective capacity of the vaccine to be developed.