The science magazine “Scientific American” has recently included genetic vaccines in the “Ten technologies to keep an eye on”. The research of new vaccination strategies must take into consideration not only the vaccine-induced immune response, but also practical factors like ease of production, storage and costs: DNA meets most of these criteria, which makes it a suitable candidate for the generation of vaccines against infectious diseases or cancer.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) developed a personalized approach that has led to complete tumor regression in a patient with metastatic breast cancer, where all other treatments failed. They used the patient’s own immune cells, but only those recognizing a set of mutated proteins expressed by the patient’s tumor.