Background The heavy incidence and mortality of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, as well as no specific drugs in curing the disease,clearly indicate the need for development of the more effective hantavirus vaccine. Refining the DNA vaccination strategy to elicit more clinically efficacious immune responses is now under intensive investigation. In the present study, we examined the effects of using an interleukin-12 expression plasmid as a genetic adjuvant to enhance the immune responses induced by a DNA vaccine based on the S gene encoding nucleocapsid protein against hantavirus. Methods BALB/c mice were immunized three times by intramuscular inoculations of DNA vaccine encoding of hantanvirus nucleocapsid protein alone or in combination with a plasmid expressing murine interleukin-12 (pcIL-12). Booster immunizations were employed 2 times at 2-week interval. To evaluate the humoral and cellular immune responses, antigen-specific lymphocyte proliferation and antibody production were assayed by MTT method and ELISA respectively. The level of interleukin-4 and interferon-γ in the splenic lymphocytic cultured supernatant were detected with ELISA kit at day 5, 10, 17, 35 and 42 after primary immunization.Conclusion Humoral and cytokine responses elicited by pcDNA3.1+S inoculation can be modulated by co-inoculation with pcIL-12 and efficiently induced Th1-dominant immune responses.