Vaccination With A Plasmid Expressing The Hantaan Virus S Gene Induces Immunity Responses Against Hantaan Virus In Mice

Gene immunization (nucleic acid immunization) is a novel technique in which naked DNA encoding specific antigen is introduced directly into mammaliam tissue. This technique can elicit CD₄⁺ -mediated humoral immunity and CD₈⁺ mediated cell immunity responses. Comparing with traditional vaccine immunization, gene immunization has some distinct advantage. It can elicit CTL and T helper (T_H ) cell responses as well as humoral immunity, without the inherent risk associated with live vaccine. It would be significantly cheaper to manufacture than recombinant polypeptide. The considerable costs involved in producing and purifying protein antigens would be avoided . Gene immunization technique have been applied to many infectious agent as HIV , HCV , HBV, influenza virus et al.Hantaan virus, the etiologic agent of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome is the prototype of the Hantaan genus of the Bunyaviridae family, it has a three-segmentsingle-stranded RNA genome, whose segments are designated as large (L), medium (M) and small (S), which encode the structural proteins RNA polymerase, envelope glycoproteins (G₁ and G₂) and nucleocapsid protein (NP) respectively. It has been...