Characterization of a Novel Respiratory Syncytial Virus-Specific

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection is a major cause of morbidity in childhood worldwide. The first human RSV-specific cytotoxic T-lymphocyte epitope to be defined is described. This HLA B7-restricted epitope in nucleoprotein (NP) was detectable in four healthy, B7-positive adult subjects using B7-RSV-NP tetrameric complexes to stain CD81 T cells. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection is a major cause of morbidity in the first 2 years of life in both developed and developing countries (9, 21). By analogy with other acute virus infections, such as influenza (15, 22), antiviral cellular immu-nity might be expected to play a central part in controlling human RSV infection. There is compelling evidence that RSV-specific type 1 T-helper responses and cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) activity are indeed critical to the disease-free control of murine RSV infection (4, 11, 19). However, study of the cel-lular immune response to RSV in infected humans has been limited by technical difficulties in obtaining adequate informa