Vaccines: A tool for the post-antibiotic era?

In honor of World Immunization Week this week, I recently read two books by Paul Offit: Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases and The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis. Both are excellent. Vaccinated is essentially a biography of Maurice Hilleman, but it also reviews how several of the important vaccines currently in use were developed and marketed. The Cutter Incident tells the story of incompletely inactivated lots of polio vaccine manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, which caused 40,000 cases of polio nationwide in 1955, including 200 cases of paralysis and 10 deaths. There are many pearls and much wisdom to be found in the pages of these two books; I recommend reading them.

Certainly the utility of vaccines is well demonstrated and their development and application is one of the major accomplishments of modern medicine. In the US alone the improvement of population health as vaccines have become available is remarkable. Globally, it has been estimated that vaccines prevent nearly 6 million deaths annually worldwide.

The books got me thinking about future potential vaccines. In one passage, Offit recounts the development of a pneumococcal vaccine and quotes Robert Austrian talking about the rationale for his work:

The only alternative then to protect those at high risk of early death is to prevent them from becoming ill.

This beautiful and simple idea -- a medical and public health truism if ever there was one ("an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure") -- strikes me as relevant to HAI and antibiotic resistant infections. Think what healthcare might be like if there were vaccines for many of the bacterial infections that are currently problematic and often resistant to antibiotics, like Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium difficile, and Neisseria gonorrhoeae.

Several antibacterial vaccines are available, including ones for pertussis, tetanus, diphtheria, meningococcus, pneumococcus, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) disease, cholera, typhoid, and anthrax. However, there are reasons that vaccines for S. aureus, C. diff, and N. gonorrhoeae (as well as others) don't yet exist. For one, the immunology can be complex, as Offit explains in the discussion of the pneumococcal vaccine. Proctor describes the situation for Staph aureus in a recent review, as do Fowler and Proctor in another review. Also, the cost of developing, testing, and licensing can be steep relative to the profits of a licensed, marketed vaccine. Yet another issue is the specter of adverse events, both real and perceived. On this point, Offit notes that

. . . a technology that would clearly save lives sits on the shelf. "We could make a group B strep vaccine tomorrow," said one senior pharmaceutical company scientist. "But it would have to be given to pregnant women and we couldn't handle the liability." 

Dempsey et al offers a recent, interesting, and partially validating study to this view of a potential group B strep (GBS) vaccine. Such issues are difficult.

That being said, perhaps vaccines should be emphasized more in the conversation regarding antibiotic resistance. I've wondered in the past about the effectiveness of developing new antibiotics when there seems to be little reason to believe, given the past track record, that they will be used responsibly. A new generation of antibiotic drugs could become useless within a few years if effective antibiotic stewardship isn't practiced globally. Vaccines, if they could be made, may offer protection against what may soon be untreatable infections. Or put differently, perhaps vaccines could be an important tool in a post-antibiotic era.

Of course, there are issues to be better understood and addressed. Recent work illustrates that Bordetella pertussis is evolving in response to the vaccine, raising the possibility that future vaccines may be associated with similar dynamics. Also, vaccines to human commensals like Staphylococcus aureus might promote overgrowth of other commensal organisms. Studies have investigated this for the case of Streptococcus vaccination and MRSA colonization and infection. Moreover, it's unclear whether people would really embrace more vaccinations given the current and recent climate surrounding vaccines.

Regardless, one seldom hears about vaccines in the conversation about antibiotic resistance. It seems like funding should address making new vaccines as well as development of new antibiotic drugs -- because Robert Austrian was right. 

(image source: CDC/PHIL)