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DNA Vaccine Poised To Deliver Safe And Cost-Effective Disease Protection

by Bidita Debnath on Nov 8 2012 10:37 PM

 DNA Vaccine Poised To Deliver Safe And Cost-Effective Disease Protection
Sophisticated vaccines are taking aim at a broad range of disease-causing pathogens, targeting them with greater effectiveness at lower cost and with improved measures to ensure safety.
To advance this quest, a research team led by Roy Curtiss, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, and Wei Kong, a research assistant professor, at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have taken a dramatic step forward, revealing the design of a universal platform for delivering highly potent DNA vaccines, by employing a cleverly re-engineered bacterium to speed delivery to host cells in the vaccine recipient.

"The technology that we're describing in this paper can be used to develop a vaccine against any virus, any parasite, any fungus, whereas this was never possible before the development of recombinant attenuated bacterial strains like those produced in our lab," Curtiss says.

The experimental vaccine described in the new research demonstrated complete protection from influenza in mice, but Wei Kong, the leading author of the new study stresses that the innovative technique could be applied to the rapid manufacture of effective vaccines against virtually any infectious invader at dramatically reduced cost and without risk to either those vaccinated or the wider public.

"By delivering the DNA vaccine using a recombinant attenuated bacterium, we can get 10,000-100,000 doses per liter of culture," Kong says, an improvement of 3-4 orders of magnitude over use of the naked plasmid DNA, which must be painstakingly isolated from bacteria before injection.

The group's research results appear in the online Early Edition (EE) of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the week of November 5, 2012.

Source-Eurekalert


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