The ability to measure proliferation of rare antigen-specific T cells among many bystanders
is critical for the evaluation of cellular immune function in health and disease. T-cell
proliferation in response to antigen has been measured almost exclusively by 3H-thymidine
incorporation. This method does not directly identify the phenotype of the proliferating cells
and is frequently not sufficiently sensitive to detect rare autoantigen-specific T cells. To
overcome these problems, we developed a novel assay for antigen-specific human T-cell …