Protecting against a difficult microbe
By Nathan Seppa
From Toronto, at a meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America
A team of scientists has devised a vaccine against Clostridium difficile by using the bacterium’s DNA. Although the researchers so far tested the approach only in mice, the results could open a new line of attack against the bacterium, which has grown increasingly resistant to antibiotics in the past 5 years.
The researchers started with C. difficile’s gene for a toxin that causes diarrhea, fever, and abdominal pain. They then altered the gene so that it would enter human cells and there make a harmless fragment of the toxin. “It’s like translating the DNA into a language the mammalian cells can understand,” says study coauthor David F. Gardiner, an infectious-disease physician at the Weill Medical College at Cornell University in New York City.