14 DAY TRIAL // A new breakthrough announced by scientists in Leicester and Dublin brings hope of an efficient vaccine against pneumonia, meningitis and septicemia.
This research was a collaboration jointly led by Dr Aras Kadioglu from the University of Leicester and Dr Ed Lavelle from Trinity College Dublin, with Dr Edel McNeela of TCD as its lead author.
The teams have proved for the first time that the bacterial toxin pneumolysin triggers an immune response by activating a recently discovered group of proteins, called the NLRP3 inflammasome.
Once the inflammasome activated, it offers protection against infection caused by pneumolysin.
Also, this immune response mechanism works on its own, independently of any other previously described immune responses proteins, contrary to what was generally believed.
This paper is the first to prove that the NLRP3 inflammasome is essential to the immune response against infection, and pneumolysin is the key to this entire process.
Having this new information about the way that this toxin interacts with the immune system, opens the way to new vaccines, that can be developed to target the pathogen more effectively.
The teams are very excited and they say that this could also help develop a vaccine against pneumococcal disease, now that the body's immune response to infection caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae is better understood.
“This is a very exciting finding and supports the development of inflammasome activating vaccines to prevent pneumococcal diseases including pneumonia and septicemia,” said Dr Lavelle, who is Lecturer in Immunology in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, Trinity College Dublin.
“If a protein based vaccine could be produced that can protect against all strains of the pneumococcus, this would be of tremendous value and our discovery that NLRP3 is needed for protection will point us in the right direction in terms of how to develop such vaccines.”
“This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the immune response to Streptococcus pneumoniae; a human pathogen of global significance, responsible for over one million infant deaths annually and the major cause of illness and death in the elderly from infections of the respiratory tract,” added Dr. Aras Kadioglu, Reader in Respiratory Infection in the Department of Infection, Immunity & Inflammation at the University of Leicester.
“In order to develop improved pneumococcal vaccines for both the very young and the elderly, it is essential to understand how this bacterium interacts with the host immune system.
“The discoveries described in our paper represent a huge stride towards this objective.
“That is why these are exciting new findings, discovered in the course of a unique collaboration between scientists at the University of Leicester and Trinity College Dublin.”
The overall team was international, with researchers from Leicester and Dublin, and collaborators from Trinity College Dublin, the US and Switzerland, and lasted four years.
It was supported by Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Meningitis Research Foundation, and the results were published in the international peer-reviewed journal PLoS Pathogens.