ABSTRACT
Advances in DNA technologies offer tremendous potential for the prevention and cure of major diseases [1-11]. Gene therapy and DNA vaccines are currently under development to tackle indications of diseases such as HIV and cancer. These research efforts and the anticipated DNA-based products will require the production of large quantities of highly purified plasmid DNA [12, 13]. The previously established laboratory technique for the isolation of plasmid DNA-cesium chloride/ethidium bromide density gradients-is scale-limited and cumbersome. The more recently reported plasmid DNA purification methods that are capable of producing multigram quantities for human clinical trials make use of modern chromatographic techniques, including size exclusion, anion exchange, and/or reversed-phase chromatography [12, 13]. However, the cost of the chromatography step(s) at a manufacturing scale is likely to be very high owing to the use of resins, which are expensive, and to the low plasmid DNA binding capacity of these resins.
