DNA vaccines: a ray of hope

Vaccines represent the most commonly employed immunologic intervention in medicine today. DNA vaccination or genetic immunization is a rapidly developing technology that offers new approaches for the prevention of disease. This method of vaccination provides a stable and long-lived source of the protein vaccine, and it is a simple, robust, and effective means of eliciting both antibody- and cell-mediated immune responses. Furthermore, DNA vaccines have a number of potential advantages such as they can address several diseases in one vaccine, they are cheap and easy to produce and have no special cold storage requirement because they are extremely stable. It has proven to be a generally applicable technology in various preclinical animal models of infectious and noninfectious diseases, and several DNA vaccines have now entered phase I/II, human clinical trials. There are several hurdles that need to be overcome on the road to the use of DNA vaccines widely. These include the technical challenges of improving delivery and/or potency so that low doses of DNA can achieve the efficacy of conventional vaccines.