Florida Health News

UCF team reports success with bubonic plague vaccine

By Harry Wessel
8/5/2008 © Florida Health News

ORLANDO -- The research team that developed a successful vaccine for the top-ranked bioterrorism threat, anthrax, now appears to be on the verge of knocking off the number-two threat, as well -- bubonic plague.

Prof. Daniell in lab at UCF

Professor Henry Daniell and his research team at University of Central Florida report that their oral vaccine for plague proved effective in animal studies and is ready for human trials. 

Daniell, 55, said there currently is no vaccine for plague, which killed 200 million people in past outbreaks and still strikes more than 2,000 people a year. 

While new drugs can take many years to come to market, Daniell said bioterrorist vaccines are usually fast-tracked. His team's capsules “could be available in a couple of years,” Daniell said. “The military is working on this, but nobody has an oral vaccine.” 

The UCF team is working on vaccines against all five diseases identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the top bioterrorist threats. The vaccines are developed in both injectible and orally administered forms, although Daniell said oral vaccines are cheaper to produce and more practical to administer in a hurry to a large number of people. 

Daniell called it "a eureka moment" when he learned the animal studies on the new vaccine -- developed for both bubonic and pneumonic plague -- showed the pill form was more effective than injections.
 
A total of 70 lab rats were used in the study, with one group given the oral vaccine, another receiving the injectible version, and a third control group having no treatment. The rats were vaccinated at UCF and then shipped to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland, where they all received huge doses of the plague. 
 
All of the unvaccinated rats died within three days, Daniell reported. One-quarter of the rats given the injectible vaccine – and 100 percent of those given the oral vaccine – survived “with no traces of the plague in their bodies,” he said. 

The results of Daniell’s research, financed through a $500,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, appeared in this month’s edition of Infection and Immunity, published by the American Society for Microbiology.

He predicts there will be a large private market for an oral plague vaccine, since private companies, not governments, will be manufacturing it. While it would be used as a bioterrorism defense, it also will be in demand for plague outbreaks unrelated to terrorism. Both India and the Congo have suffered outbreaks in recent years. 

The UCF team developed the vaccine by genetically engineering plant cells with a protein from the plague bacteria,Yersinia pestis. Three to five doses of the vaccine “kick-started the immune system into producing antibodies, which protects against the deadly disease,” said Daniell. The professor joined the UCF faculty in 1998 and led the formation of UCF’s first biotechnology company, Chlorogen. 

Harry Wessel can be reached at harrywessel@gmail.com. The editor can be reached at Carol.Gentry@FloridaHealthNews.org.