ABSTRACT
Today, AIDS is considered as a global problem and many efforts to generate an effective vaccine against this disease have been made, but remain inconclusive. DNA vaccines are a member of the new generation of vaccines that can efficiently stimulate the immune system. However, recent findings indicate low immunogenicity for these vaccines and it is believed that these types of vaccines require strategies that could infer more immunogenicity. The employment of adjuvants could be considered as one of the most important methods involved. In this study, a DNA vaccine candidate for HIV P24-Nef is constructed and then using genetic adjuvants IL-15 and GM-CSF, cellular immune responses have been studied. In this study the gene structure of HIV P24-Nef in eukaryotic expression vector was constructed and expression vectors of IL-15 and GM-CSF were used as adjuvants. After inoculation of the candidate vaccine to BALB/c mice, cytokine patterns, lymphocytes proliferation and cytotoxicity were analyzed. Our findings indicate that candidate vaccine significantly stimulated cellular immune responses. The usage of IL-15 and GM-CSF as DNA adjuvants together and separately with candidate vaccine has strengthened cellular immune responses significantly. Co-administration of DNA adjuvants significantly increased cellular immune responses when the ratio of the vaccine dose was more than the adjuvants. The sequences that we selected as candidate vaccine demonstrated good immunogenicity in mouse model and co-administration of IL-15 and GM-CSF DNA adjuvants increased cellular immune response to DNA vaccine construct