期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:2016
卷号:113
期号:25
页码:6898-6903
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1603007113
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:Immunization strategies against commensal bacterial pathogens have long focused on eradicating asymptomatic carriage as well as disease, resulting in changes in the colonizing microflora with unknown future consequences. Additionally, current vaccines are not easily adaptable to sequence diversity and immune evasion. Here, we present a “smart” vaccine that leverages our current understanding of disease transition from bacterial carriage to infection with the pneumococcus serving as a model organism. Using conserved surface proteins highly expressed during virulent transition, the vaccine mounts an immune response specifically against disease-causing bacterial populations without affecting carriage. Aided by a delivery technology capable of multivalent surface display, which can be adapted easily to a changing clinical picture, results include complete protection against the development of pneumonia and sepsis during animal challenge experiments with multiple, highly variable, and clinically relevant pneumococcal isolates. The approach thus offers a unique and dynamic treatment option readily adaptable to other commensal pathogens.