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Iron age arms race

Fighting bacteria with their own defensive molecules

January 12, 2017 6:52 PM UTC

Two research groups have turned bacteria’s own survival mechanisms against them with therapeutic vaccines based on siderophores - iron-scavenging molecules the pathogens secrete that are not ordinarily immunogenic. The preclinical studies showed conjugating siderophores to immunogenic carrier proteins could treat urinary tract infection (UTI) and salmonella, but the idea could have widespread utility because of the large number of bacteria that depend on iron.

The results were published in November in two independent studies in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one from the University of Michigan and the other from a collaboration between researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California Irvine (see Distillery, Jan. 5, 2017). ...