Echinococcus multilocularis infection and dendritic cells (DCs)

Dendritic cells (DCs) are most powerful professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that induce T cell immune responses upon pathogen recognition. Increasing our knowledge on the interaction of DCs with antigens from the metazoan parasite Echinococcus multilocularis may be essential to fully understand respective infection and disease. The intense periparasitic granulomatous infiltration found in experimentally infected mice indicated an intense host-parasite interaction, and the involvement of cellular immunity in the control of the metacestode growth kinetics was strongly suggested by experiments carried out in different T cell deficient mice. So far, we know that obstructed presenting activity of AE-MO appeared to trigger an unresponsiveness of T cells leading to the suppression of their clonal expansion during the chronic phase of AE infection. It now remains to be studied what role the professional DCs are going to play in that game.