Instead of a dreaded injection with a needle, getting vaccinated against disease may soon be just eating a bowl of yoghurt.
Mansour Mohamadzadeh – a professor of medicine in gastroenterology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in the US – has developed a new oral vaccine using probiotics, the healthy bacteria found in dairy products like yoghurt and cheese.
Besides eliminating the "Ouch!" factor, the vaccine also has other benefits…
Terrence Barrett, chief of gastroenterology at Feinberg, said delivering a vaccine to the gut is the most logical route.
"Nature isn't used to seeing antigens injected into a muscle," said Barrett. "The place where your immune system is designed to encounter and mount a defence against antigens is your gut."
Delivering the vaccine to the gut through swallowing – rather than injecting it into a muscle – harnesses the full power of the body's primary immune force.
"You swallow the vaccine, and the bacteria colonise your small intestine and start to produce the vaccine in your gut, with which you get a much more powerful immune response than by injecting it," Mohamadzadeh said.
STILL, MORE ADVANTAGES…
There are other advantages to the new oral vaccine, the boffins said.
Probiotics, which are natural immune stimulants, eliminate the need for an inflammatory chemical in vaccines. These chemicals are generally used to "tease" the body into triggering an immune response.
Also, these probiotic vaccines are inexpensive to produce.
Apart from using the approach in a preclinical study to create immunity to anthrax exposure, Mohamadzadeh has also used the technology to develop a breast cancer vaccine, and vaccines for various other infectious diseases.
In his study – reported in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science – he fed mice the new oral anthrax vaccine, and then exposed them to anthrax bacteria.
Eighty per cent of the mice survived, which is comparable to when they were injected with an anthrax vaccine.
"And the immune response was more robust than the injected vaccine," Mohamadzadeh said.
He has developed a 'multi-tasking' cancer vaccine against breast, colon and pancreatic cancer that will soon be tested in mice.
"The technology can also be used to develop vaccines for HIV, hepatitis C and the flu," he added.
Mansour Mohamadzadeh – a professor of medicine in gastroenterology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in the US – has developed a new oral vaccine using probiotics, the healthy bacteria found in dairy products like yoghurt and cheese.
Besides eliminating the "Ouch!" factor, the vaccine also has other benefits…
Terrence Barrett, chief of gastroenterology at Feinberg, said delivering a vaccine to the gut is the most logical route.
"Nature isn't used to seeing antigens injected into a muscle," said Barrett. "The place where your immune system is designed to encounter and mount a defence against antigens is your gut."
Delivering the vaccine to the gut through swallowing – rather than injecting it into a muscle – harnesses the full power of the body's primary immune force.
"You swallow the vaccine, and the bacteria colonise your small intestine and start to produce the vaccine in your gut, with which you get a much more powerful immune response than by injecting it," Mohamadzadeh said.
STILL, MORE ADVANTAGES…
There are other advantages to the new oral vaccine, the boffins said.
Probiotics, which are natural immune stimulants, eliminate the need for an inflammatory chemical in vaccines. These chemicals are generally used to "tease" the body into triggering an immune response.
Also, these probiotic vaccines are inexpensive to produce.
Apart from using the approach in a preclinical study to create immunity to anthrax exposure, Mohamadzadeh has also used the technology to develop a breast cancer vaccine, and vaccines for various other infectious diseases.
In his study – reported in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science – he fed mice the new oral anthrax vaccine, and then exposed them to anthrax bacteria.
Eighty per cent of the mice survived, which is comparable to when they were injected with an anthrax vaccine.
"And the immune response was more robust than the injected vaccine," Mohamadzadeh said.
He has developed a 'multi-tasking' cancer vaccine against breast, colon and pancreatic cancer that will soon be tested in mice.
"The technology can also be used to develop vaccines for HIV, hepatitis C and the flu," he added.
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