Quantitative analysis of the antigen-specific IFNγ+ T cell-mediated immune response in conventional outbred pigs: kinetics and duration of the DNA-induced IFNγ+ CD8+ T cell response

It is now well established that antigen-specific CD8+ T cells play a major role in vaccine-induced immunity against intracellular pathogens and tumor cells. The detection of these immune cells in outbred animals has been hampered mainly by the need to generate individual autologous antigen-presenting cells (APCs) due to the high degree of polymorphism of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) Class I loci. We used individually derived immature porcine dendritic cells infected with a pox-based recombinant viral vector to ex vivo stimulate PBMCs from vaccinated conventional pigs. The frequencies of antigen-specific T cells was determined by the number of IFNγ-secreting cells in a quantitative enzyme-linked immune spot (ELISPOT) assay. Using this approach we were able to rank different pseudorabies virus (PRV) vaccines strategies for their ability to prime viral-specific IFNγ+ T cells. Plasmid DNA has recently emerged as a promising tool with multiple applications in the field of infectious diseases, allergy and cancer. We showed for the first time in this study that DNA immunization induced a long-lived antigen-specific IFNγ+ T cells response in conventional pigs. Additional studies allowed us to show that these virus-specific IFNγ+ responding cells detected in this ELISPOT assay were MHC-restricted and comprised in the CD8αbright pig T cell subset. These new data confirm the usefulness of DNA vaccines to control diseases requiring cellular immunity in pigs.