Fighting Persistence: How Chronic Infections with Mycobacterium tuberculosis Evade T Cell-Mediated Clearance and New Strategies To Defeat Them

Abstract

Chronic bacterial infections are caused by pathogens that persist within their hosts and avoid clearance by the immune system. Treatment and/or detection of such pathogens is difficult, and the resulting pathologies are often deleterious or fatal. There is an urgent need to develop protective vaccines and host-directed therapies that synergize with antibiotics to prevent pathogen persistence and infection-associated pathologies. However, many persistent pathogens, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis , actively target the very host pathways activated by vaccination.