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October 25, 2007
New combination vaccine effective against plague
New combination vaccine effective against plague
Disease/Infection News
Published: Wednesday, 18-May-2005
Plague, a bacterium that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages and is today one of the most feared potential agents of bio-terrorism, may have met its match, according to Wake Forest University School of Medicine scientists.
Steven B. Mizel, Ph.D., principal investigator, told the American Gastroenterological Association meeting in Chicago that when mice immunized with a new combination vaccine were challenged with a lethal dose of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, "the immune mice survived but the control mice succumbed in three days."
Mizel and his graduate student, Anna Honko, found that injecting a protein taken from plague bacteria into a mouse - one method of vaccination - produces little if any response in the mouse immune system. But if a protein termed flagellin is added to the vaccine, antibody levels against the plague bacteria are 500,000 times higher.
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http://www.news-medical.net/?id=10193
Posted by Donna Braquet at October 25, 2007 07:55 PM