Tehran University Medical Journal

Background: Today, several vaccines have been developed to prevent infectious diseases. The older first-generation vaccines may have many problems. In this regard, genetic engineering plays an important role using tools such as shuttle vectors to develop recombinant DNA vaccines that usually include plasmid constructed so that can propagate in two different host species. The present study reviews a variety of shuttle vectors, their structures, productions, pathogenicity and more importantly their applications in the production of novel vaccines.
Methods: A systematic review was performed based on search in international databases with no time limit including Scopus, PubMed and Google Scholar. All databases were searched using the standard (English and Persian) keywords. Relevant articles from 1996 to 2018 were collected from search of international databases including Science Direct, Google Scholar, and PubMed using keywords such as “shuttle vectors”, “recombinant plasmids” and “DNA vaccines”.
Results: In this study, a total of 31 full texts were used. A shuttle vector typically contains similar components to replication origins and promoters and can propagate in various hosts. Nowadays, they are used in designing and constructing of new vaccines against infectious diseases including tuberculosis and viral hepatitis. Also, Multi-epitope peptide DNA vaccines are effective against some viruses and they are potentially effective against some bacteria such as Helicobacter pylori.
Conclusion: Shuttle vectors as a powerful genetic engineering tool have a high ability to study the mechanisms of pathogenic microorganisms and make new vaccines such as DNA vaccines and multi-epitope vaccines. The hope is that such multi-epitope DNA vaccines might induce immunity against multiple antigenic targets, multiple strain variants, and/or even multiple pathogens. However, the ability of DNA vaccination to co-deliver a series of antibody and/or CD4 T cell epitopes remains largely unexplored.