Feature: At the DNA vaccine vanguard

Ian Frazer and his team.

DNA vaccines have been touted for over a decade as a potential game changer in disease control.

However, like many potentially breakthrough technologies that look exciting on paper – from stem cell therapies, to nanotechnology, to personalised medicine – getting them to produce an effective, safe and reliable therapeutic effect in the real world has proven to be a major hurdle.

Yet, if you were dishing out odds on who might be the first to clear that hurdle, Professor Ian Frazer would have to be a front runner. After all, he’s done it before.

Read more about DNA vaccines.

Along with his late colleague, Dr Jian Zhou, Frazer developed the world’s first vaccine for cervical cancer by protecting against human papillomavirus, the virus responsible for the vast majority of the deadly cancers.

Now Frazer has turned his attention towards the tremendous potential of DNA vaccines, with another sexually transmitted disease in his sights: herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2).

This stubborn virus has remained defiant to vaccine treatments in the past, but if Frazer’s gambit proves successful, we’ll have not only the world’s first vaccine against the disease, but we could also see the first long-awaited DNA vaccine for humans. The trick will be getting it to work, although preliminary signs are tantalising.

Under the skin

DNA vaccines have been developed and used successfully on animals, with several currently deployed. However, none have yet been approved for human use.

Early human trials for DNA vaccines against viruses such as HIV demonstrated that the technique is well tolerated and safe, but unfortunately the expected levels of immune response weren’t reached. Various labs are now exploring a range of strategies to optimise the immune response in the hope of developing a DNA vaccine that might finally live up to the hype.

Frazer and his team have employed two strategies to boost the performance of their HSV-2 vaccine, both developed through his spinoff biotech, Coridon.

“Our approach started with some research observations made 10 years go about the means by which DNA is translated in human cells, and the fact that the efficiency of transcription of DNA and its translation into proteins is different between different cell types,” says Frazer.

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