Studies by an international research team suggest that rates of disease caused by the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae could be substantially reduced by changing how vaccines are designed. The scientists, at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Imperial College London combined genomic data, models of bacterial evolution, and predictive modeling to identify how vaccines could be optimized for specific age groups, geographic regions, and communities of bacteria.
The study, published in Nature Microbiology, simulated the performance of vaccines over time to assess the risk of vaccine-targeted strains being replaced by other, potentially dangerous strains of bacteria. Through this predictive modeling approach, the researchers identified new vaccine designs that could help reduce overall rates of disease. “Our research shows that the best vaccine designs strongly depend on the bacterial strains present in the population, which vary considerably between countries,” commented Nicholas Croucher, PhD, senior lecturer, bacterial genomics, at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Imperial College London. “The best vaccine designs also depend on the age group being vaccinated. These ideas will be critical for applying lessons learned from introducing vaccines in high-income countries to combating the disease where the burden is highest.” Croucher and colleagues reported on their studies in a paper titled, “Designing ecologically optimized pneumococcal vaccines using population genetics.”
