Also, a few studies provided interesting comparisons of the same antigens administered as recombinant protein or DNA vaccines and showed that the latter were overall more effective than their recombinant protein counterparts. Indeed, DNA vaccines were able to induce a stronger Th1 bias in the immune response, a longer-lasting immunity, and/or a better protection against disease progression [19, 31, 32, 35, 40, 44] . While most of these studies have used a rather artificial infectious challenge based on the injection via nonnatural routes of high parasite doses, an experimental system criticized by some authors, the superior efficacy of DNA vaccines was also observed using a low-dose intradermal challenge in the ear, which was proposed to more closely mimick natural infection [45] . In these studies, both DNA and protein vaccination were able to induce very similar level of short-term (2 weeks postvaccination) protection against infection with L. major, but only DNA vaccine was able to induce long-term (12 weeks postvaccination) protection [45] .