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 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,” Mateos Hernández explained to EFE.
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.
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).
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%.
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.
EFE
