Immunity to Ocular and Genital Herpes Simplex Viruses Infections

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Clinical and Developmental Immunology Volume 2012, Article ID 732546, 2 pages doi:10.1155/2012/732546 Editorial Immunity to Ocular and Genital Herpes Simplex Viruses Infections Aziz Alami Chentoufi, 1 Lbachir BenMohamed, 2 Philippe Van De Perre, 3 and Ali A. Ashkar 4 1 Pathology and Clinical Laboratory Medicine, Department of Immunology, King Fahad Medical City, Riyadh 11525, Saudi Arabia of Cellular and Molecular Immunology, Gavin Herbert Eye Institute, College of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-4375, USA 3 INSERM U 1058, Universit´ e Montpellier 1, 34090 Montpellier, France 4 Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, McMaster Immunology Research Centre, McMaster University, Room MDCL4015, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON, Canada L8S 4K1 2 Laboratory Correspondence should be addressed to Aziz Alami Chentoufi, aachentoufi@kfmc.med.sa Received 20 November 2012; Accepted 20 November 2012 Copyright © 2012 Aziz Alami Chentoufi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Herpes simplex virus type 1 and type 2 are amongst the most common human viral infection. Despite decades of research, currently, there is no vaccine or sterilizing therapy against human herpes. Both innate and adaptive immunities are required for protection against herpes infec- tions. However, the immunity and immunopathology of herpes infections are not yet fully characterized. To better understand the immunopathology of herpes infections and ultimately design an eﬃcient prophylactic or therapeutic herpes vaccine or treatment, it is fundamental to define the cellular and molecular immune mechanisms and the immune correlates required for an eﬃcient control of these ubiquitous pathogens. Over 400,000 Americans suﬀer from ocular herpes caused by HSV-1. Each year, nearly 50,000 new and recurring ocular herpes cases are diagnosed in the United States, with the more serious stromal keratitis accounting for about 25 percent. About 1 billion people— one-sixth of the world’s population—are infected with HSV- 2, the most common cause of genital herpes. In the United States, an estimated 50 million people carry the virus, and up to 3 million of those people suﬀer recurrent outbreaks of painful genital herpes. While the majority of HSV-1 and HSV-2 seropositive individuals is asymptomatic, a nonneg- ligible number of symptomatic individuals have as often as four recurrent herpes per year and required treatments. In addition, genital herpes has played an important role in driving the prevalence of other sexually transmitted infection such as HIV. Current drug therapies, often used to suppress genital herpes, can also treat ocular herpes but do not prevent future outbreaks. There is currently no prophylactic or therapeutic vaccine against herpes in the market. The impairment of T-cell function in acute and latent infection has been reported at many levels including abnormal antigen presentation in the periphery and in the sensory ganglia (trigeminal and lumbosacral ganglia), latently infected neuronal cells resistance to apoptosis by CD8+ T-cells, unbalanced immunoregulatory T-cell func- tion, and deregulation of Th1/Th2/Th17 axes. Despite the identification of many HSV-1 and HSV-2-antigens and their derived CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell epitopes, numerous antigen- specific therapies have failed when evaluated for their utility in the prevention and treatment of HSV infection. In this special issue, we invited authors to submit original research and review articles highlighting the recent advances that have broadened our understanding of immunity and immunopathology of herpes infection and HSV vaccine strategies. Also, we welcomed papers that seek to define immunoregulatory and eﬀector properties of T-cells and dendritic cells to provide new insights as to their potential for clinical use. We were interested in articles that explore salient aspects of protective immunity throughout HSV latency, reactivation, ocular and genital herpetic disease, negative immunosynergy between HSV and HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, and immunotherapeutical approaches. In a paper of this special issue, P. Stuart and T. Keadle documented the numerous recurrent models of herpetic stromal keratitis (HSK) that have been developed and how data generated from these models diﬀers in some important