Immunological adjuvants are defined as agents which act nonspecifically to enhance immune responsiveness to a specific antigen. While many substances are known to have adjuvanticity, remarkably little is understood about the mechanism by which they enhance either the antibody response or cellular immunity. It is now clear, for at least some antigens, that interaction of three cell types is required for antibody formation: thymus-derived lymphocytes (T cells), bone marrow-derived lymphocytes (B cells), and probably macrophages. In studies on the specificity of response to haptenprotein conjugates, it has emerged that the specificity of the antibody-producing cell (hapten specific) is generally not the same as that of the T cell which bears immunological memory (carrier specific) (1-3). In addition, the characteristics of the helper cell involved in antibody formation, i.e. thymus derived, nonantibody secreting, carrier specific, and nondividing, appear at present indistinguishable from those of the thymus-derived lymphocyte responsible for cell-mediated immunity (4).We chose to pursue this analogy by exploring the effects of the two most effective immunological adjuvants in mice, pertussis vaccine and tubercle bacilli, the latter at least, known also to engender delayed-type hypersensitivity. The in vitro immunization system developed by Mishell and Dutton (5) permitted us to study the effect of adjuvant on a primary in vitro response to sheep erythrocytes (SRBC).We
Materials and MethodsThe adjuvants used in this study were Bordetdla pertussis vaccine, fluid, USP (E. Lilly & Co., Indianapolis, Ind.) containing 8 antigenic units (AU/ml (equivalent to no fewer than 6.4 X 101° standard pertussis organisms/ml). For use in vitro, the organisms were dialyzed * Present address:
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