Editorial
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2021. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Nov 7, 2021; 27(41): 7005-7013
Published online Nov 7, 2021. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v27.i41.7005
Nucleic acid vaccines: A taboo broken and prospect for a hepatitis B virus cure
Efthymios P Tsounis, Athanasia Mouzaki, Christos Triantos
Efthymios P Tsounis, Christos Triantos, Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Patras, Patras 26504, Greece
Athanasia Mouzaki, Division of Hematology, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Patras, Patras 26504, Greece
Author contributions: Tsounis PE was responsible for the literature search and analysis, drafting of the manuscript, and interpretation of the data; Mouzaki A and Triantos C were responsible for revising the manuscript for important intellectual content; All authors gave their final approval of the submitted version.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Christos Triantos, FAASLD, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Patras, D. Stamatopoulou 4, Patras 26504, Greece. chtriantos@hotmail.com
Received: March 18, 2021
Peer-review started: March 18, 2021
First decision: July 3, 2021
Revised: July 7, 2021
Accepted: October 14, 2021
Article in press: October 14, 2021
Published online: November 7, 2021
Processing time: 232 Days and 11 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: A nucleic acid vaccine could be of particular value in the field of hepatitis B virus therapies. DNA vaccines have been studied more extensively over the past two decades and have been shown to overcome immune exhaustion in preclinical models of chronic infection. Although vaccination elicited robust humoral and cellular immune responses, it had negligible effects on clinical endpoints. Therefore, the scientific community has focused on optimizing vaccine design and delivery to improve immunogenicity. Electroporation-mediated delivery of multivalent plasmids in combination with molecular adjuvants could efficiently restore adaptive immunity in virally suppressed patients and be part of future combination therapy.