A bacterial organism associated with honey bees can be used to create a safe and effective vaccine for immunization against a common and serious sexually transmitted disease, gonorrhea. The non-pathogenic, naturally attenuated, obligate commensal of honey bees, bacterium Snodegrassella alvi (S. alvi), is distantly related to Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which is responsible for the sexually transmitted infection, gonorrhea. S. alvi expresses a number of proteins similar to those produced by N. gonorrhoeae, and antibodies raised against S. alvi bind with high affinity to N. gonorrhoeae, which promises to provide protective immunity against infection. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 800,000 new gonococcal infections occur in the United States each year, leading to serious and permanent health problems in both men and women. No vaccines are available to prevent gonorrhea, and previous attempts at developing an effective vaccine have failed, limiting available treatment options to the use of antibiotics. Since the gonorrhea-causing N. gonorrhoeae pathogen rapidly develops resistance to antibiotics, this makes the infection increasingly hard to treat and increases health care costs as well as spread of infection.
In addition, another related organism, Neisseria meningitidis, causes meningococcal meningitis, and it’s likely that S. alvi can be used as the basis for creating a vaccine to protect against this serious and sometimes fatal disease.
Attenuated live bacterial vaccine using the honey bee commensal bacteria S. alvi to generate a safe and effective immune response that provides protection against Neisseria infections (including gonorrhea and bacterial meningitis)
S. alvi (a honey bee obligate commensal bacterium) forms the basis of a naturally attenuated, live vaccine that will lead to production of antibodies that cross-react with Neisseriaceae gonorrhoeae and provide protective immunity against gonorrhea. Compelling in vivo data shows that vaccination of mice with S. alvi induces significant serum bactericidal activity against N. gonorrhoeae.
