PARIS – A Cuban scientist, another from Spain and another from Paraguay are working in France on a promising indirect vaccine for Lyme disease, which targets the microbiota of ticks and reverses classical vaccination principles, opening up a world of possibilities for other diseases.
With the Cuban researcher Alejandro Cabezas-Cruz as team leader and the Paraguayan Alejandra Wu Chuang and the Spanish Lourdes Mateos Hernández as their main collaborators, the first results with mice, recently published, show a new way to combat pathologies that spread through transmission vectors such as mosquitoes or ticks.
This is the case of Lyme disease, for which a vaccine has never been found and which can cause problems with the skin, the nervous and vascular systems, among others.
“It can become quite serious because it can cause some neuropathies,” says Wu Chuang, originally from Asunción.
It is triggered by Borrelia-type bacteria as a result of the bite of infected ticks and although it is not as famous as dengue or malaria, it has made headlines when stars such as singer Justin Bieber or model Bella Hadid confessed to suffering from it.
“We are focused on making vaccines against the vector, which in this case is the tick, and what we have produced are antibodies against bacteria that are within the tick’s microbiota,” explains Mateos Hernández.
More specifically, instead of vaccinating humans or animals so that they produce an immune response against a pathogen, what these researchers propose is to indirectly modify the bacteria that live within the transmission vector.
The first step in this logic is to analyze the internal bacteria of the tick and vaccinate the study subjects, in this case mice, so that they produce the desired antibodies.
When ticks bite mice, they receive the antibodies through their blood and these alter the tick’s microbiota so that the bacteria that cause Lyme disease can no longer colonize it.
“This means that, if it cannot enter the tick, when the tick feeds on another animal it will not transmit the disease,” says Mateos Hernández, originally from Valdepeñas (Castilla-La Mancha).
A NEW VACCINATION PARADIGM THAT CAME OUT OF A DREAM
The research of these scientists, who work in a mixed unit of French institutions – the National Institute for Agricultural Research (Inrae), the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Labor Health Safety (Anses) and the National Veterinary School of Alfort , just outside Paris – may not only be revolutionary for Lyme disease, but for many others.
Instead of “immunizing against A to protect against A”, with the antimicrobial vaccine, as this research group that calls itself NeuroPaTick has named it, immunizes “against A, to protect against B”, in the words of Cabezas-Cruz.
“It is an important paradigm shift and the original idea comes from a dream that occurred in 2020,” recalls the Cuban researcher.
Until now, no scientific group had thought of vaccinating against the microbiota of vectors to protect against the pathogens they transmit, details the scientist, despite the fact that in the last 30 years there has been “much scientific evidence” that the bacteria that live inside are essential for their survival and for the transmission of pathogens.
To this is added that, with classical vaccines, it has not been possible to eradicate vector-borne diseases, as has happened for other types of pathologies, such as poliomyelitis. For example, with the best malaria vaccine to date, after many resources have been invested, the efficacy is less than 50%.
“Antimicrobial vaccines are a new tool that allows us to think about the eradication of vector-borne diseases, in a situation where there is climate change and the associated temperature changes are exposing the European population to diseases that were previously exotic”, highlights Cabezas- Cross.
The entire process to use the Lyme disease vaccine may still take 5 to 10 years of development.
In the meantime, vigilance against ticks must be maintained, which are the second largest vector of disease transmission -only behind the mosquito- and whose danger is often not taken into account.
“It kind of takes a backseat, but I think we should all be careful, especially when we go to wooded or slightly humid areas,” advises Wu Chuang.
2023-08-08 23:31:40
#Hispanic #scientists #promising #vaccine #tickborne #disease
