TUESDAY, Sept. 2, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- A dual-action anthrax vaccine that prompts the immune system to attack both the anthrax bacterium and the toxins it produces has been developed by scientists at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
The current vaccine targets only the toxins produced by anthrax bacteria.
The new vaccine was tested on mice. They were first injected with the vaccine and then, 10 days later, with anthrax toxin. All the vaccinated mice survived exposure to the toxin, while unvaccinated mice died within 24 hours.
The scientists created the dual vaccine by chemically joining 2 anthrax molecules that are the bacterium's major virulence factors in disease. But when used in a vaccine, these molecules act as antigens. They stimulated a person's immune system to produce disease-fighting antibodies.
"Clearly, there is a need for a better anthrax vaccine. The bivalent vaccine we came up with is likely to be much more effective at protecting against systemic anthrax because it targets both virulence factors of Bacillus anthracis -- its toxin and its capsule," lead researcher Julia Wang says in a news release.
The study appears in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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