This product would be an alternative to antibiotics, the effectiveness of which decreases as antibiotic resistance increases.
- According to the American Urological Association, more than 150 million urinary tract infections are reported worldwide each year.
- A urinary tract infection is considered recurrent when there are more than four episodes per year.
- Scientists believe they can use this technique for other infections such as endocarditis or tuberculosis.
Urinary tract infection is caused by bacteria. Present in the urine, they multiply until they reach the kidneys, if not treated in time. Women are more affected than men, and they are sometimes faced with recurrence: infections are more frequent and more difficult to treat. “Even if you clear the bacteria from the bladder, the populations persist elsewhere and usually become resistant to the antibiotic being used.explains Nicole De Nisco, assistant professor of biology. When patients accumulate resistance to antibiotics, they will eventually run out of options.” To provide them with another solution, the scientist is working with her team to develop a vaccine against urinary tract infections. The results of their research appeared in ACS Nano.
What are the risks of a urinary tract infection?
“Patients lose their bladders to save their lives because the bacteria cannot be killed by antibiotics or because of extreme allergy to antibiotics, which is more common in the older population than people realize“, she adds. An untreated or poorly treated urinary tract infection can lead to sepsis, a potentially fatal condition.
A new vaccine model
Scientists have developed an innovative vaccine model, known as a whole-cell vaccine. To protect us from infections, vaccines work by introducing a small amount of killed or weakened pathogens, or some of their components, into the body. These antigens prompt the immune system to produce antibodies against a particular disease. Building vaccines against pathogenic bacteria is difficult because bacteria are much larger and more complex than viruses. Often, vaccines contain only a small portion of the bacteria, because when stored whole, its lifespan is usually too short to elicit an immune response. In this test, the scientists used a method called MOF antigen deposition which “allows an intact, dead pathogen to exist in the tissues longer, as if it were an infection, in order to trigger a large-scale immune system response”.
Effectiveness validated in an experiment on mice
To test the serum, the scientists used a strain of bacteria Escherichia coli, responsible for about 80% of urinary tract infections. “When we injected these mice with a lethal dose of bacteria, after they had been vaccinated, almost all of our animals survived, which is a much better performance than with traditional vaccine approaches.noted study co-author Jeremiah Gassensmith. This result has been seen several times, and we are quite impressed with its reliability..” Before being used for humans, the effects of this vaccine will have to be confirmed in future studies.
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