A JOLT of electricity might be the key to making an effective hepatitis C
vaccine, say Silvia Zucchelli and her colleagues at the Institute for Molecular
Biology Research in Rome and Merck Research Laboratories in Pennsylvania. There
is currently no vaccine for the disease, which kills 25,000 people a year in the
US alone.
The team found that if the skin of mice, rats or rabbits is given a small
shock after they are injected with an experimental DNA vaccine for hepatitis C,
antibody production increases by up to 30 times (Journal of Virology,
vol 74, p 11,598). The…
