Vaccination has changed little since the time of Louis Pasteur. The method involves deliberately injecting a dead or inactivate organism into a person to stimulate their immune system to produce cells that fight off the fully fledged organism.
However, many infections have resisted all attempts at producing vaccines.
One of these is the herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), which is usually the cause of genital herpes.
Now Michal Margalith at Vical, a biopharmaceutical company based in San Diego, says he and colleagues have developed an HSV-2 vaccine using the emerging technology of DNA vaccines.
This involves injecting the patient with a circular piece of DNA called a plasmid that programs their cells to produce HSV-2 proteins that trigger an immune response. That should train the vaccinated person’s immune system to fight off the real virus.
The team says that the technique has successfully produced an immune response in mice. However, DNA vaccines are still highly experimental in humans.
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