Harnessing DNA-induced immune responses for improving cancer vaccines.

ABSTRACT: DNA vaccines have emerged as an attractive strategy to promote protective cellular and humoral immunity against the encoded antigen. DNA vaccines are easy to generate, inexpensive to produce and purify at large-scale, highly stable and safe. In addition, plasmids used for DNA vaccines act as powerful "danger signals" by stimulating several DNA-sensing innate immune receptors that promote the induction of protective adaptive immunity. The induction of tumor-specific immune responses represents a major challenge for DNA vaccines because most of tumor-associated antigens are normal non-mutated self-antigens. As a consequence, induction of potentially self-reactive T cell responses against such poorly immunogenic antigens is controlled by mechanisms of central and peripheral tolerance as well

SUBMITTER: Herrada AA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3601143 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature