Targeted DNA vaccines eliciting crossreactive anti-idiotypic antibody responses against human B cell malignancies in mice

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Therapeutic idiotypic (Id) vaccination is an experimental treatment for selected B cell malignancies. A broader use of Id-based vaccination, however, is hampered by the complexity and costs due to the individualized production of protein vaccines. These limitations may be overcome by targeted DNA vaccines encoding stereotyped immunoglobulin V regions of B cell malignancies. We have here investigated whether such vaccines might elicit cross-reactive immune responses thus offering the possibility to immunize subsets of patients with the same vaccine. METHODS: Fusion vaccines targeting patient Id to mouse Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) class II molecules (chimeric mouse/huma..