Artifical Eukaryotic Promoters

The creation of chemical vaccines, ie vaccines that could readily be produced without the impediment of going through a biological system, is the ultimate goal in vaccinology. The linear expression element technology was enabling to do this for gene vaccines. However, a technical limitation was that the standard CMV promoter was very long (~1.5kb), difficult to chemically synthesize, and was subject to extensive regulation. To solve this problem we came up with the idea of artificially creating a small piece of DNA that would serve as an effective promoter while being easy to chemically synthesize. The innovation is to use a loop out or gap structure to attract the RNA polymerase. Such as structure can entail less than 100bp.