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The day is not far where people suffering from gonorrhea will have vaccines to treat them.
Gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease that causes 78 million new cases worldwide each year, is very damaging if it is left untreated or poorly treated.
It can lead to endometritis, pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, epididymitis and infertility. Babies born to infected mothers are at increased risk of blindness.
The researchers identified a protein that fuels the virulence of the bacteria that causes gonorrhea, opening up the possibility of a new target for antibiotics and, better still, a vaccine. ] The microbe, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, is considered a "superbug" because of its resistance to all classes of antibiotics available to treat infections.
"Infections are very often silent," says researcher Aleksandra Sikora. 50% of infected women do not have symptoms, but these asymptomatic cases can nevertheless have very serious consequences on the patient's reproductive health, miscarriage or premature delivery, "he added.
Better antibiotic therapy and a vaccine are needed since N. gonorrhea strains are resistant to most new treatments.
The body depends on enzymes known as lysozymes that, as their name suggests, thwart bacteria by causing their cell wall. Lysozymes are abundant in the epithelial cells that make up the tissue on the outside of the organs and inside the body cavities and in the phagocytic cells that protect the body by ingesting foreign particles and bacteria.
In turn, many Gram-negative bacteria – characterized by their cell envelope that includes a protective outer membrane – have developed ways to overcome lysozymes.
Now that new targets have been identified, they can be explored as potential candidates. new antibiotics or a vaccine – if the lysozyme inhibitor can itself be inhibited, the bacterium's infection capacity is greatly reduced.
Sikora and his collaborators call the new SliC protein, abbreviation for lysozyme-type lysozyme inhibitor.
Study of SliC function in culture as well as in a gonorrhea mouse model – mice were infected with N. gonorrhoea, then verified for SliC expression at one, three and five days – r Researchers determined that the protein was essential for bacterial colonization because of its anti-lysozyme role.
"This is the first time that an animal model has been used to demonstrate the role of a lysozyme inhibitor in gonorrhea infection," says Sikora.
The study appears in the journal PLOS Pathogens
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