Understanding the Role of B Cells in Presentation of Malaria Antigen to CD8+T Cells

Abstract

Malaria, one of the infectious diseases still persists as a challenging issue despite the advancement has made in the field of parasitology. In addition, the recent surge in the delayed parasite clearance has created the bleak condition of drug-resistant which resulted in the finding of other therapeutic intervention to fight against the malaria. Targeting the parasite at the liverstage is an ideal approach to a successful interruption of the malaria infection. The numerous vaccines have been tried so far against the liver-stage infection to induce sterile protection by activating the CD8+ T cells. Dendritic cells (DCs) have been widely known as a professional antigen presenting cells (APCs) which directly/indirectly activate the CD8+ T cells which play an important role in dampening the activity of parasites in the liver stage (LS), the most suitable target for the vaccine development. However, recent reports of subunit vaccines fail to generate CD8+ T cells due to the lack of appropriate platform and the complex life cycle of Plasmodium. Recently, the involvement of B cells in the activation of CD8+ T cells has gained the attention. Therefore, our work is mainly focused on understanding the status of CD8+ T cells during the repetitive immunization with malaria liver-stage antigen CSP as well as the activation of memory B cells.