CD8 + T cells are primed by cDC1 and exacerbate tau-mediated neurodegeneration

preprint OA: closed CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Abstract

There are changes in adaptive immunity in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and increases in activated CD8 + T cells in brain correlate with tau pathology 1–3 . However, which cells mediate T cell priming in tau-mediated neurodegeneration remains unclear. In different conditions such as cancer, viral infections, and autoimmune diseases outside the CNS, conventional type-1 dendritic cells (cDC1) perform antigen cross-presentation to prime CD8 + T cells 4,5 . We demonstrate that tauopathy mice deficient in cDC1 are markedly protected against tau-mediated neurodegeneration and display a selective decrease in brain CD8 + T cell infiltration and glial reactivity. The remaining CD8 + T cells showed an antigen inexperienced status with less clonal expansion, indicating suboptimal T cell priming. We confirm that brain derived antigens are presented in secondary lymphoid tissues to prime CD8 + T cells. Our study identifies cDC1 cells as critical for CD8 + T cell priming outside the CNS. This priming is required for a large increase of activated CD8 + T cells in the brain which promotes tau-mediated neurodegeneration.
Full text 1,439 characters · extracted from oa-html · click to expand
Abstract There are changes in adaptive immunity in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and increases in activated CD8+ T cells in brain correlate with tau pathology1–3. However, which cells mediate T cell priming in tau-mediated neurodegeneration remains unclear. In different conditions such as cancer, viral infections, and autoimmune diseases outside the CNS, conventional type-1 dendritic cells (cDC1) perform antigen cross-presentation to prime CD8+ T cells4,5. We demonstrate that tauopathy mice deficient in cDC1 are markedly protected against tau-mediated neurodegeneration and display a selective decrease in brain CD8+ T cell infiltration and glial reactivity. The remaining CD8+ T cells showed an antigen inexperienced status with less clonal expansion, indicating suboptimal T cell priming. We confirm that brain derived antigens are presented in secondary lymphoid tissues to prime CD8+ T cells. Our study identifies cDC1 cells as critical for CD8+ T cell priming outside the CNS. This priming is required for a large increase of activated CD8+ T cells in the brain which promotes tau-mediated neurodegeneration. Competing Interest Statement D.M.H. co-founded, has equity, and is on the scientific advisory board of C2N Diagnostics. D.M.H. is on the scientific advisory board of Genentech, Denali, and Cajal Neuroscience and consults for Pfizer, Asteroid, Switch Therapeutics, and Roche. All other authors declare no competing interests.

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-html

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2026) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00
unpaywall
last seen: 2026-05-22T02:00:06.705733+00:00
License: CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0