HPV vaccine can help prevent Chlamydia
Researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio have been awarded a $1.8 million grant to continue their quest to find a vaccine for the Chlamydia. The team of researchers have been studying the disease, which is the world’s most prevalent bacterial sexually transmitted infection, for the past nine years.
The grant will allow the team to examine in greater detail how the infection causes Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, which can have extremely serious consequences for fertility in women. As Chlamydia is often asymptomatic, patients often do not know they have been infected until irreparable damage has already been done to their reproductive system. It is believed that that the full extent of the damage caused by this infection will be revealed over the coming years, as the most high-risk group – the under 25s – start trying to have children. In the UK one charity estimated that at least 10% of this group is carrying the infection, but Chlamydia screening is still not being taken up frequently enough to dent this figure.
The Texas team have already had some success with developing a vaccine after it was reported in 2007 that a PhD student has successfully inoculated mice after three years of trying. Bernard Arulanandam has recently presented his team’s vaccination strategy for the strain of Chlamydia present in the upper genital tract. They have been greatly heartened by the success of the HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccine, which is now being widely distributed to teenage girls in the hope that it was dramatically reduce rates of cervical cancer. As the team leader Bernard Arulanandam put it, ‘With the recent success of the human papilloma virus vaccine I think the urgency to develop a Chlamydia prevention vaccine is on the horizon’.
A vaccine is certainly needed. The HPV vaccine is incredibly promising because women frequently miss smear tests and so do not catch the irregular cells early enough to prevent them becoming cancer. Similarly, young people simply do not get tested for STIs regularly, making a vaccine essential.
However, until that vaccine is developed, governments are seeking new ways to get their teens tested. Many UK health trusts have been mass-sending Chlamydia test kits to at-risk groups and the USA is trialling Chlamydia tests using STI home tests sent through John Hopkins University. Chlamydia home testing, as well as gonorrhoea home testing, has proved successful in Britain with many private clinics offering the service for a fee. Patients are sent a kit to their homes and then when the sample has been posted back to the lab receive their results via a text message or through a secure website.
The University of Texas is not the only team seeking to find a vaccine for this infection. Genocea Biosciences has also been receiving a fair amount of publicity after the new company announced it has raised $23m to help fund their research into 5 vaccination programs, the first of which will be focused on Chlamydia.
Clearly race is on – and whoever wins stands to make a lot of money from the treatment. For now however, with infection rates skyrocketing, we are very dependant on the screening programs already in place making some dent into the numbers of those catching the infection.
