MSU researchers believe a vaccine could slow down antibiotic resistance
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Antibiotic medicine has been a godsend, saving countless lives. But health experts know that, for now, they are only a short-term solution.
Antibiotic use also allows bacteria to adapt and become resistant, temporarily eliminating the threat but ultimately strengthening the beast for another showdown in the future.
A team at Michigan State University is working to change that. The researchers believe they have developed a weapon to keep that threat caged forever.
Dr. Xuefei Huang and his collaborators published their latest study in the academic journal Nature Communications, which explains how their carbohydrate-based vaccine can slow down that adaptation process by preventing bacterial infections in the first place.
Huang, a professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering, says human reliance on antibiotics has allowed bacteria to adapt to the point where once-successful treatments are no longer as effective.
“Bacteria, they are smart. They come up with systems that will fight off all of this toxic agent to them. That’s why we have this issue,” Huang told News 8.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about 47 million antibiotic courses — nearly 28% of the annual total — are prescribed each year for infections that don’t need antibiotics, like colds or the flu.
That reliance has already led to deadly results. In the U.S. alone, more than 20,000 people have died annually over the last four years from antibiotic-resistant infections. According to the World Health Organization, antimicrobial resistance was directly responsible for more than 1 million deaths in 2019.
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Huang believes the financial incentive behind pharmaceuticals has also played a role.
“New antibodies need to be continually developed. Traditionally, a lot of pharmaceutical companies have been hesitant to develop new antibiotics because the return on investment is not very high,” he said. “So if you look at the pipeline and development, there’s a big gap. I think a 20-to-30-year gap … in terms of drug candidates that have been developed.”
Instead of relying on antibiotics to serve as a catchall fix for illnesses, Huang believes it makes more sense to use a preventative vaccine to tackle antimicrobial resistance.
“A vaccine can reduce the infection rate and protect us from getting sick. Then we don’t need to use as many antibiotics, which not only protects us, but in the long run protects the whole society,” Huang said. “If we use less antibiotics, there are less chances for resistance to emerge.”
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For the study, Huang and his collaborators have focused on Staphylococcus aureus and its protégé, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA.
Unlike most vaccines, which use protein antigens, the vaccine to target bacterial infections relies on sugars called saccharides to help the body identify the bacteria. However, those sugars, which line the cell wall of bacteria, can be arranged in myriad ways. Without the right arrangement, the vaccine will be less effective.
“Some parts (of the pattern) are not important. That has been shown in the literature. If you target the wrong parts, (the vaccine) won’t work,” Huang explained.
Like other studies, Huang’s team has homed in on one popular antigen candidate commonly referred to as PNAG. Experimental vaccines targeting PNAG are in human trial stages, and there are signs of success.
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Huang’s team has cataloged PNAG’s 32 different structures. By breaking it down further, the researchers were able to track two specific patterns in the antigen that triggers the most effective response.
Experiments in mice have shown vaccines focused on those two patterns have been even more effective than the initial PNAG trial. One test came back 1,000-times more effective than the first trial.
Huang says the next step is to continue to refine the vaccine formula and to ensure that it can be manufactured at a feasible rate.
“The vaccine worked really well in mice, but we know mice are very different from humans. It’s really important that we show the efficacy of our vaccine protects against infections in humans,” he said. “Before we can even start to test on humans, we need to figure out how to make this on a larger scale. We made this in the lab. Can we scale it up? (The goal is to) protect millions of people from these infections. Do we have a process that will be able to scale it up, can we manufacture it in a really high purity.”
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If the MRSA vaccine can be proven to be successful, he believes it could also serve as a model to tackle other types of bacterial infections, specifically mentioning tuberculosis and gonorrhea.
Said Huang: “This is an early step in a very, very important problem, but it potentially could be much bigger than staph aureus and target many different bacteria that way. We could get one shot, one vaccine, to target many different types of bacteria.”
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