Recombinant Bordetella Boosts Neisseria Vaccine Development.(meningitis vaccine)

2001 OCT 17 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Sonia Nichols, senior medical writer - A better way of preparing vaccines against Neisseria meningitidis may soon be on the horizon if studies now being performed in France continue to show positive results.

N. meningitidis is a major cause of meningitis, killing up to 15% of the people who contract it. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are safe and effective vaccines available for preventing several strains of N. meningitidis, but they are not regularly used in the U.S. and are not considered effective in children younger than 18 months. Now, though, a group led by researchers at the Pasteur Institute of Lille, France, have developed a recombinant vaccine delivery system using Bordetella pertussis that appears to be better for promoting the formation of antibodies against N. meningitidis serogroup B in mice. The vaccine could be effective in humans too, researchers say.

To prepare the vaccine, Isabelle Coppens and colleagues of the Pasteur Institute, in conjunction with colleagues at Transgene and Aventis Pasteur, both of France, selected a potently immunogenic portion of N. meningitidis known as transferrin-binding protein B (TbpB) to recombine with Bordetella. "TbpB was genetically fused to the N-terminal domain of the Bordetella pertussis filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA), and the fha-tbpB hybrid gene was expressed in B. pertussis either as a plasmid-borne gene or as a single copy inserted into the chromosome," Coppens and associates described in Infection and Immunity.