{"doi":"10.1093/jimmun/vkaf163","title":"Great “Tex”-pectations","abstract":"This Pillars of Immunology article is a commentary on a pivotal article written by Barber et al and published in Nature in 2006.1 A great question can inspire groundbreaking experimentation, catalyze collaboration, and broadly propel a scientific field’s evolution. In their 2006 article, Professor Rafi Ahmed’s group did just that by raising the following question: “What limits a T cell’s effector function during chronic antigen exposure?”1 Their results would go on to inspire the last 2 decades of research in the field of immunotherapy. As a naive T cell is recruited into an immune response, its effector and memory potential is regulated by the strength and duration of T cell receptor signaling. Before this study by Barber et al, it was known that acute activation of T cells in murine and human viral infection settings (lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus [LCMV] Armstrong, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, etc.) can establish a potent pool of effector T cells, with a subset of cells further developing into long-lived memory T cells. However, if the source of antigen persists, as occurs during chronic viral infection (LCMV clone 13, human immunodeficiency virus, hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, cancer, etc.), the T cells progressively lose their proliferative capacity and ability to mount an effector response, now commonly described as “exhaustion.”2–6","journal":"The Journal of Immunology","year":2025,"id":579616,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9488,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":250684,"name":"Ben Youngblood","orcid":"0000-0002-1261-9957","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":684002,"name":"Grace Ward","orcid":"0000-0003-4404-7727","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":25,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:58:34.718602Z","pmid":"41169233","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}