{"id":3211202,"date":"2024-04-24T13:12:07","date_gmt":"2024-04-24T17:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=3211202"},"modified":"2024-04-24T13:12:07","modified_gmt":"2024-04-24T17:12:07","slug":"vaccine-antibiotic-resistance-bacteria-mrsa-3211202","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/vaccine-antibiotic-resistance-bacteria-mrsa-3211202\/","title":{"rendered":"New vaccine could fight antibiotic resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"
Researchers have created a vaccine to fight antibiotic resistance.<\/p>\n
Driven by the overuse of antimicrobials, pathogens are quickly building up resistances to once-successful treatments. It’s estimated that antimicrobial-resistant infections killed more than 1 million people worldwide in 2019, according to the World Health Organization.<\/p>\n
“There are worries that at the rate things are going, in perhaps 20 or 30 years, few of our drugs will be effective at all,” says Xuefei Huang, a Michigan State University Research Foundation Professor in the chemistry and biomedical engineering departments.<\/p>\n
“This would bring us back to the pre-antibiotic age.”<\/p>\n
Now, in a new Nature Communications<\/em><\/a> study, Huang and his collaborators have reported a breakthrough that will help tackle this global threat head-on. Specifically, the team has created a promising vaccine candidate for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.<\/p>\n Bacterial vaccines, along with antibiotics, are a crucial tool in the fight against deadly microbes.<\/p>\n In the latest paper, Huang announced several discoveries that will help the development of a carbohydrate-based vaccine for infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus<\/em> and its “superbug” relative methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus<\/em>, or MRSA<\/a>.<\/p>\n Staph aureus, or staph<\/a>, and MRSA are among the most prevalent causes of bacterial infections.<\/p>\n Using an innovative delivery platform created by the Huang group at MSU, the team’s preclinical vaccine formulation offered high levels of immunity from lethal levels of staph and MRSA in animal trials.<\/p>\n With this work, Huang and his team have expanded the frontiers of vaccine science, equipping fellow researchers with new knowledge to improve and refine future bacterial vaccines.<\/p>\n To develop a vaccine, researchers must identify an effective antigen. This is a substance or molecule that the body flags as foreign, helping to trigger an immune response and the creation of antibodies that will fight future infection.<\/p>\n While most vaccines rely on protein antigens, Huang is an expert in the chemistry and biology of carbohydrates. These are chemical compounds comprised of saccharides, or sugars.<\/p>\n Developing carbohydrates to use as antigens in vaccines comes with its own unique challenges and advantages.<\/p>\n “Sugar structures are very specific to certain bacteria,” Huang explains. “A vaccine that works against one bacterium might not work at all against another, even if they’re very similar.”<\/p>\n This is why a single dose of a bacterial vaccine can contain many different antigens. For instance, the “20” in Pfizer’s PREVNAR 20 pediatric pneumonia vaccine<\/a> refers to the 20 unique strains of bacteria it protects against.<\/p>\n If researchers can develop an antigen that’s shared among many\u2014if not all\u2014bacteria, vaccination coverage would be greatly improved.<\/p>\n Gerald Pier, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a collaborator on the latest paper, has studied one such antigen candidate for years.<\/p>\n Polysaccharide poly-\u03b2-(1\u22126)-N-acetylglucosamine, or PNAG, is a carbohydrate found on the cell wall of staph, many other bacteria, and even fungi<\/a>. This prevalence makes it extremely useful, offering potential protection against numerous pathogens at once.<\/p>\n By examining PNAG as an antigen candidate for staph, Pier, Huang, and their colleagues are unlocking the secrets needed to make a more effective vaccine.<\/p>\n Imagine creating a mosaic made from multicolored tiles.<\/p>\n Arrange these tiles in a precise pattern and you’ll end up with a striking work of art. Move just a few tiles around, however, and you’ll find yourself looking at a very different image.<\/p>\n PNAG\u2014and carbohydrates in general\u2014are kind of like mosaics. There are myriad ways to arrange their individual pieces, but only a select few have the effects that researchers desire.<\/p>\n Just as changing a few tiles in a mosaic can give you a completely different image, swapping out these pieces or even changing their location within a PNAG molecule changes its performance as a potential antigen.<\/p>\n “We were very interested in this molecule and these different patterns,” Huang says.<\/p>\nCarbohydrate challenges<\/h3>\n
Mosaic of molecules<\/h3>\n