Protection against chlamydia

Chlamydia vaccines have shown safety in the first clinical trials

Vera Mukhina, N+1

Human studies have demonstrated the safety of two new vaccines against chlamydia, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases. Both have successfully passed the first phase of clinical trials, showing their immunogenicity and lack of side effects, according to the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.

Chlamidia trachomatis bacteria are transmitted from person to person sexually and provoke diseases of the genitourinary system. In many cases, chlamydia is almost asymptomatic, but it can cause serious complications and is dangerous during pregnancy. The "quiet" lifestyle of bacteria allows them to remain unnoticed in the body for a long time, so many people start treatment with a long delay. This has allowed chlamydia to become one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases – according to WHO estimates, 127 million people worldwide fell ill with it in 2016 alone. Chlamydia is treated with antibiotics, but for the above reasons it does not slow down the general spread of infection, so the development of preventive methods of protection against this disease, including vaccines, is very relevant.

Sonya Abraham and her colleagues have recently successfully completed the first stage of clinical trials of vaccines. The study was conducted at Hammersmith Hospital in London on 35 subjects: two groups of 15 healthy women tested two versions of the vaccine, and five more were in the control group. All of them received three injections for four months, and then two more doses in the form of nasal spray, and neither the subjects nor the doctors knew who belonged to which group. During the study, no serious side effects were detected, and the problems found, such as pain from injections, were mostly distributed among all three groups. It is worth noting that this is still the first stage of clinical trials and there are few people – perhaps some effects will appear in the future.

Both vaccines showed their efficiency and gave (unlike placebo) an immune response, but one of them turned out to be more promising for further research. Both variants are made on the basis of the membrane protein of the bacterium C. trachomatis, but they use different additives as immune response enhancers. In the CTH522:AH vaccine, aluminum hydroxide is the standard adjuvant of many vaccines, and in CTH522:CAF01 – CAF01, a relatively new additive based on cationic liposomes. Antibodies for the second vaccine were detected earlier in the blood, there were more of them and, in general, the immune response was more powerful. These advantages increase its chances of getting to the next stage of testing, which the authors of the article plan to conduct on a larger sample.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru