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Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and their collaborators in the United Kingdom have discovered a new way that the bacteria that cause gonorrhea resist the body’s immune defenses. This can leads to development of vaccines to empower immune system to kill the sexually transmitted bug that has conquered most antibiotics.
More than 78 million people contract gonorrhea yearly, the sexually transmitted disease has traditionally been treated with antibiotics, but the rise of drug-resistant gonorrhea has prompted the Centers for Disease Control to label it an urgent threat. The CDC estimates more than 246,000 gonorrhea infections each year are resistant to at least one antibiotic.
Gonorrhea can lead to blindness, infertility, serious infections in the heart and nervous system, and death. Gonorrhea takes a two-fisted approach to neutralizing lysozyme, an enzyme that degrades bacteria and is abundant in tears, saliva and other secretions at body sites where the gonorrhea bacteria grows.
Gonorrhea produces two proteins, known as inhibitors, that bind directly to lysozyme, preventing it from doing its job. Gonorrhea’s inhibitors “confer full resistance to this abundant antimicrobial defense. When the researchers created a version of gonorrhea that lacked the two inhibitors, lysozyme killed the bacteria much more easily. Both of the inhibitors were found on the surface of the gonorrhea bacteria, making them able to be recognized by the immune system.
That suggests that scientists could develop drugs or vaccines to make the bacteria susceptible to lysozyme, a major part of the body’s natural immune defense. The gonorrhea bacteria use two independent proteins to inhibit lysozyme, one of the main enzyme defenses human bodies have against bacteria. Lysozyme resistance is key to the survival of the gonorrhea bacterium.