Multi‐epitope DNA vaccines

The evolution of vaccine strategies has seen a move from whole organisms to recombinant proteins, and further towards the ultimate in minimalist vaccinology, the epitope. The epitope‐based approach is clearly compelling as only a relatively tiny, but immunologically relevant, sequence is often capable of inducing protective immunity against a large and complex pathogen. The post‐reductionist era in epitope‐based vaccinology has seen a quest to re‐construct complexity and design vaccines containing many epitopes. The hope is that such multi‐epitope vaccines might induce immunity against multiple antigenic targets, multiple strain variants, and/or even multiple pathogens. The ability of DNA vaccination to co‐deliver a series of antibody and/or CD4 T cell epitopes remains largely unexplored. Successful viral vector and DNA‐based experimental vaccines coding for multiple contiguous CDS CTL epitopes have, however, recently been described. This simple CTL poly‐epitope (or polytope) strategy may find application in the design of vaccines against several diseases including EBV, HIV and cancer.