色花堂

The day after 鈥檚 son turned one, his knee swelled up, turning hot and red. He couldn鈥檛 put any weight on his leg and he cried constantly.

It was the start of a horrible month in hospital. The little boy had osteomyelitis, a bone infection caused in his case by Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as S. aureus, Staph aureus or just 鈥渟taph鈥�.

Langley, a senior research fellow in Molecular Medicine and Pathology at the University of 色花堂, had already spent years studying staph. He still felt as helpless as any father watching his son suffer. The experience cemented his determination to understand the tricky bacterium better.

Today, Langley鈥檚 son is fourteen and healthy, but his father鈥檚 resolve has only strengthened. As co-principal investigator of a team led by his longtime mentor, Professor , Langley is working on a project to develop an mRNA vaccine for staph. The project is funded by , within the  programme, which has put the 色花堂 team in touch with a global consortium of teams working on various dimensions of mRNA technology.

Fraser, Radcliff and Langley know staph better than just about any other team in the world. Fraser, who is dean of the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, started working on the bacterium some 30 years ago when he was part of a team that made the major discovery of a set of proteins called superantigens that were unique to staphylococcus and streptococcus bacteria. 

Langley did his PhD under Fraser and returned to the same lab after a postdoctoral fellowship in the United States. He has been publishing research on staph for 20 years.

Radcliff came to the field through a more circuitous route but has been familiar with staph since her days growing up on a dairy farm in Tasmania. Staph is the most common cause of mastitis 鈥� udder infections 鈥� in dairy cows. It鈥檚 a major economic issue for farmers because an infection can lead to a whole tanker load of milk being thrown out, says Radcliff, who has worked in Fraser鈥檚 lab for 15 years and has a background researching both bacteria and vaccines.

This deep knowledge is part of why Fraser believes he and his team can do better than previous teams have in producing a vaccine against staph.

鈥淲hy a vaccine? Simple answer is, we鈥檙e running out of antibiotics,鈥� says Fraser. 鈥淰accines have been tried for staph before, taking a relatively simple approach 鈥� generating antibodies to surface molecules and hoping those antibodies kill the bacteria. They鈥檝e all failed, some spectacularly, because they were based on the assumption that what we need to do is sterilise the body from staph. It鈥檚 such a common bacterium and it hides in so many places in the body, we don鈥檛 think that鈥檚 possible.鈥�

The other reason Fraser and his team believe they鈥檒l be able to produce a breakthrough staph vaccine is because vaccine technology has improved.

As the Covid-19 pandemic upended the world, enormous resources were poured into vaccine research. Covid vaccines were produced with unprecedented speed. The safest and most effective were a new type of vaccine 鈥� mRNA vaccines.

Traditional vaccines use inactivated virus or virus particles to teach the body鈥檚 immune cells to recognise them and thus mount a speedier defence when active virus invades the body. mRNA vaccines work differently. They use bits of messenger RNA that can enter cells and teach them to create just one part of the virus 鈥� in the case of Covid, the characteristic spike protein. The body鈥檚 immune system thus learns to recognise and attack these spike proteins without having been exposed to the virus itself.  

There鈥檚 still a lot of science to do. While the team has shown that its vaccine stimulates a robust neutralising antibody response in mice, it鈥檚 still working to understand which immune cell populations contribute most to the protective immunity seen in the animals. More work also needs to go into ensuring safety before humans can be inoculated.

Without the massive resources poured into Covid-19 vaccines, things won鈥檛 go as fast. Still, the team believes its vaccine will be ready for human clinical trials within a few years. Clinical trials will take longer than the Covid vaccine trials did because S. aureus doesn鈥檛 infect people at anywhere near the rate of a major Covid wave, so results won鈥檛 come in as fast.

The team does, however, have every intention of seeing its vaccine through. It will be able to take advantage of the linkages formed through the Wellcome Leap R3 programme, including with groups working on producing clinical-grade mRNA and groups researching ways to produce vaccines and other products on a smaller and less expensive scale. It鈥檚 already talking to potential industry partners in New Zealand.