Efficient protection against Mycobacterium tuberculosis by vaccination with a single subdominant epitope from the ESAT-6 antigen.

When this epitope was co-administered with a second ESAT-6 epitope (1-20), the responses were shown to be biased toward the latter epitope (1-20). The authors suggest that this bias may be attributable to a greater accessibility of the 1-20 epitope after intracellular processing of ESAT-6. The authors report a similar bias in response to immunization with intact ESAT-6.