Expression of genes by vaccinia virus vectors

Abstract

Abstract Jenner introduced the use of cowpox virus as a vaccine against smallpox in 1798, and, as he predicted, this practice led to the eradication of smallpox (in 1977), although in the modern era it was vaccinia, not cowpox, virus which was used as the smallpox vaccine. Today, variola (smallpox) virus is confined to two high-security laboratories in Moscow and Atlanta, and the World Health Organization plans to destroy these last stocks in 1993 after the genomes of representative strains have been sequenced. Cowpox and vaccinia viruses have clearly played important roles in the history of human medicine, since they represent the first human vaccine and the only vaccine whose use has resulted in the eradication of a human disease. Surprisingly, interest in poxviruses in general, and vaccinia virus in particular, increased substantially after the disappearance of smallpox. This interest stemmed, in a large part, from the development of vaccinia virus as an expression vector and from the potential use of vaccinia virus recombinants as live vaccines against pathogens other than variola virus. In this chapter, concepts and protocols central to the use of vaccinia virus as an expression vector are described. Readers should refer to another chapter in this series (1), which provides an earlier account of this topic and contains several protocols which remain essentially unaltered, and to another recent review on the construction and applications of vaccinia virus recombinants (2).