Two-pronged immune response offers hope for effective Salmonella vaccine

Research from the University of Birmingham has renewed hope that an effective vaccine could be developed against nontyphoidal strains of Salmonella. The findings suggest that the body's immune system could be primed to tackle even the most resilient of strains. In developed countries, nontyphoidal Salmonella (NTS) strains are mainly food-borne and usually cause gastroenteritis. In rare cases, they can lead to bacteraemia (bacterial infections of the blood). However, in the developing world, bacteraemia is far more common and serious: fatality rates can be as high as almost one in four among children under two years old and HIV-infected adults. The work carried out by the University of Birmingham, the University of Malawi College of Medicine and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine is funded by the Wellcome Trust and GlaxoSmithKline and published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In previous research led by Dr Calman MacLennan, scientists based at the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (MLW) in Blantyre, Malawi , showed that disease-causing strains of NTS were able to survive outside cells in the blood of children.