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. 1984 Dec;58(3):522–530.

Evidence for the presence of M. leprae reactive T lymphocytes in patients with lepromatous leprosy.

I Nath, M Sathish, T Jayaraman, L K Bhutani, A K Sharma
PMCID: PMC1577090  PMID: 6391762

Abstract

Evidence for the presence of Mycobacterium leprae reactive T cells in many lepromatous leprosy (LL) patients was obtained using in vitro antigen-induced lymphoproliferative responses. (1) Co-cultures of T enriched cells from LL patients when combined with 2 h adherent cells (AC) from HLA-D compatible tuberculoid leprosy individuals showed significant levels of 3H-thymidine incorporation in the presence of soluble and integral M. leprae antigens. (2) More interestingly, autologous T cell + AC co-cultures also showed significant improvement in antigen-induced lymphoproliferation in nine of 16 lepromatous patients. Insignificant improvement was observed in similar co-cultures of tuberculoid leprosy patients. (3) Addition of exogenous, purified human interleukin-2 (IL-2) to antigen stimulated PBMC from some lepromatous patients showed the best improvement in terms of overall 3H-thymidine incorporation, indicating that lepromatous patients possess T cells which can differentiate to an IL-2 responsive state. Significantly, the level of proliferation varied within the group. A proportion of clinically similar lepromatous patients failed to show improvement by any of the above methods.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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