PURPOSE Despite aggressive conventional therapy, glioblastoma (GBM) remains uniformly lethal. Immunotherapy, in which the immune system is harnessed to specifically attack malignant cells, offers a treatment option with less toxicity. The expression of cytomegalovirus (CMV) antigens in GBM presents a unique opportunity to target these viral proteins for tumor immunotherapy. Although the presenc...

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is a frequent complication in transplant recipients. This retrospective study compared real-time PCR (rt-PCR) and a pp65 antigen assay as tools for monitoring CMV infection in solid organ (SOT) and bone marrow (SCT) transplant patients. The study tested 2662 samples by rt-PCR, and 1284 specimens with a pp65 antigen assay. 24.3% of the rt-PCR samples and 4.1% of t...

Cytomegalovirus (CMV)-specific T-cell immunity plays an important role in protection from CMV disease in immunocompromised patients. Identification of cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) epitopes is essential for monitoring T-cell immunity and also for immunotherapy. In this and previous studies, CMV-pp65-specific CTL lines were successfully generated from all of 11 CMV-seropositive healthy donors, us...

Antigen-specific, cytokine flow cytometry was used to analyze the prevalence and frequency of CD4 and CD8 memory T cells specific for the abundantly expressed cytomegalovirus (CMV) phosphoprotein 65 (pp65) in healthy CMV IgG-seropositive individuals. Stimulation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells with peptide pools and individual peptides derived from the pp65 amino acid sequence in 40 donor...

Purpose: Despite aggressive conventional therapy, glioblastoma (GBM) remains uniformly lethal. Immunotherapy, in which the immune system is harnessed to specifically attack malignant cells, offers a treatment option with less toxicity. The expression of cytomegalovirus (CMV) antigens in GBM presents a unique opportunity to target these viral proteins for tumor immunotherapy. Although the presen...

The initial interaction of human cytomegalovirus with fibroblasts triggers, and then partially blocks, an innate immune response pathway that leads to the induction of IFN-responsive genes and proinflammatory chemokines. Infection of fibroblasts with human cytomegalovirus inhibited their ability to respond to exogenous IFN. Consistent with the observation that the block did not depend on de nov...

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) harmfully impacts survival after peripheral blood hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (PB-HSCT). Delayed immune reconstitution after cord blood (CB)-HSCT leads to even higher HCMV-related morbidity and mortality. Towards a feasible dendritic cell therapy to accelerate de novo immunity against HCMV, we validated a tricistronic integrase-defective lentiviral vecto...

T cells are crucial for the control of cytomegalovirus (CMV) in infected individuals. Although CMV-specific T cells can be quantified by various methods, clear correlates of protection from CMV disease have not been defined. However, responses to the pp65 protein are believed to play an important role. Here, the proportions of interferon gamma-producing T cells following ex vivo activation with...

To define whether individual human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I allotypes are used preferentially in human cytomegalovirus (CMV)-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte responses, CD8+ T cell responses restricted by up to six HLA class I allotypes in an individual were measured in parallel using K562-based artificial antigen-presenting cells expressing both CMV pp65 antigen and one of 32 HLA class I...

UL97 is a protein kinase encoded by human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) and is an important target for antiviral drugs against this ubiquitous herpesvirus, which is a major cause of life-threatening opportunistic infections in the immunocompromised host. In an effort to better understand the function(s) of UL97 during HCMV replication, a recombinant HCMV, NTAP97, which expresses a tandem affinity puri...