At present, challenges in drug delivery include engineering intelligent vectors for simultaneous diagnosis and treatment, vectors that are safe, easily administered, and with a reduced cost.
Initial efforts involved engineering viral vectors to deliver genes to the appropriate cells.
More recently, combinatorial strategies for engineering AAV vectors using error-prone PCR, DNA shuffling, and other molecular cloning techniques have been established.
Here we propose that engineering viral vectors to express antigens in activated DCs will provide the most effective vaccines for priming an immune response.
Despite an ongoing scientific discussion in the field of travel medicine, further research is required for vaccine development, state-of-the-art laboratory tests, and genetic engineering of vectors.
Engineering adenovirus vectors has taken the direction of deleting larger and larger segments of the viral genome, leading to high-capacity 'gutted' vectors that lack all viral coding sequences [ 14].
From linear elasticity theory, the generalised Hooke's law for isotropic material can be written as σ i = C i j ( z ) ε j ; i, j = 1 to 6, (3)where σ i is the stress vector, C i j ( z ) is the stiffness matrix and ε j is the engineering strain vector of the material at a distance z from the middle surface with reference to the principal material axes (1, 2, 3).
Understanding the biology of these viruses is essential in engineering better vectors and generating vectors more efficiently for large-scale use.
Several recent advances in the areas of AAV serotype analysis, transgene engineering, and vector delivery to muscle, together with novel means of rescuing mutant mRNA transcripts, have yielded impressive results in animal models of DMD.
