Leishmania donovani: Immune response and immune evasion with emphasis on PD-1/PDL-1 pathway and role of autophagy

Leishmania donovani is one of the causative agents of visceral leishmaniasis. The immune response against Leishmania depends on CD4+ T helper type 1 cells. The immune system is unable to combat Leishmania because the parasite can exert several immune suppressive mechanisms that facilitate escaping t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Medicine
Main Authors: Samar Habib, Manar Azab, Khaled Elmasry, Aya Handoussa
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications 2021
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.4103/1995-7645.315895
https://doaj.org/article/4b9c54888da04f10b7020579a564b34a
Description
Summary:Leishmania donovani is one of the causative agents of visceral leishmaniasis. The immune response against Leishmania depends on CD4+ T helper type 1 cells. The immune system is unable to combat Leishmania because the parasite can exert several immune suppressive mechanisms that facilitate escaping the immune responses. One of these mechanisms is the up-regulation of programmed death-1/programmed death ligand-1 pathway which causes T cells to undergo exhaustion. Autophagy is strongly linked to the immune response, with some research indicating that activating autophagy reduces the immune response to some intracellular pathogens, while others indicate that activating autophagy limits the growth of intracellular pathogens. Leishmania was found to subvert the host defense mechanisms for its own persistence, such as Leishmania-induced autophagy modulation. Leishmania was reported to activate autophagy in different studies, thus getting a dual benefit by evading the immune system and simultaneously utilizing the autophagy byproducts as nutrients. In this review, we introduced different immune evasion/suppressive mechanisms used by Leishmania, and different immunotherapies which were developed accordingly. We focused on the programmed death-1/programmed death ligand-1 pathway as well as autophagy with the potential interplay of both mechanisms.