Differential polarization of immune responses by co-administration of antigens with chemokines

Chemokines are key players in the elicitation of immune response, by selectively attracting subpopulations of immune cells to the site of antigen presentation. Therefore, they are natural candidates for modulating immune responses to antigens qualitatively and quantitatively. We have selected chemokines associated with different arms of the immune response, i.e. RANTES/CCL5, B-lymphocyte chemoattractant/CXCL13, and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1/CCL2, and co-injected DNA expression constructs encoding these chemokines with constructs encoding two HIV antigens, gp120 and gp160, in mice. We subsequently measured markers of both cellular and humoral immune responses, and found that these chemokines qualitatively influenced the outcome of immune responses to both antigens, essentially according to their predicted association to Th profiles. These results are relevant towards the engineering of novel vaccine and immune-based therapies, and point to chemokines as candidate adjuvant and immunomodulatory molecules.