Regarding the infectivity of naked DNA

[Ian A. York]

In article <wardp-2405951215400001 at oisin.usask.ca> wardp at herald.usask.ca (Pearse Ward) writes:
>
>Although, as Ian York pointed out in his latest post, local trauma at the
>injection site may very well be important in providing some sort of
>adjuvant effect.

There's a slight complication in the studies which used intravenous
injection of DNA complexed with liposomes.  These people got expression of
their protein at various sites, and I believe in some experimets they got
an immune response.  In this case, there probably is no trauma at the site
of DNA uptake (unless your definition of trauma includes the minor local
trauma that's omnipresent, in which case it's so broad as to be
meaningless); but in this case it isn't as clear (at least to me) that 
no APC took up the DNA.  It's still a very strange phenomenon, and I'm 
kind of in the wait-and-see mode for the explanation.

Ian

-- 
Ian York   (york at mbcrr.harvard.edu)
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 44 Binney St., Boston MA 02115
Phone (617)-632-3921     Fax  (617)-632-2627