Nucleic acid vaccination strategies against infectious diseases

Abstract

Introduction: Gene vaccines are an interesting and emerging alternative for the prevention of infectious diseases, as well as in the treatment of other pathologies including cancer, allergies, autoimmune diseases, or even drug dependencies. When applied to the target organism, these vaccines induce the expression of encoded antigens and elicit the corresponding immune response, with the potential ability of being able to induce antibody-, helper T cell-, and cytotoxic T cell-mediated immune responses.

Areas covered: Special attention is paid to the variety of adjuvants that may be co-administered to enhance and/or to modulate immune responses, and to the methods of delivery. Finally, this article reviews the efficacy data of gene vaccines against infectious diseases released from current clinical trials.

Expert opinion: Taken together, this approach will have a major impact on future strategies for the prevention of infectious diseases. Better-designed nucleic acid constructs, novel delivery technologies, as well as the clarification of the mechanisms for antigen presentation will improve the potential applications of this vaccination strategy against microbial pathogens.

Keywords:

• Clinical trial
• DNA-vaccine
• gene-vaccine
• immunoadjuvant
• RNA-vaccine

Declaration of interest

C Gamazo was partially funded by the Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica of Spain, and co-funded by the European regional development fund, under the grant PI12/01358. Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad from Spain (RTC-2014-2004-2). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Notes

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