Vaccines as a Secondary Strategy in the Fight Against Antimicrobial Resistance

We are continuing our new series, Media Day, where we spotlight individual medical institutions and infectious disease (ID) programs. This episode is with the Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), which is part of Hackensack Meridian.

Barry Kreiswirth, PhD, director, Kreiswirth Lab, Center for Discovery and Innovation points out they were developing vaccines for Klebsiella years ago, but that the creation of antimicrobials were more an attractive approach at that time.

“People were developing vaccines against Klebsiella back in the 50s in a parallel manner, like we did against strep pneumonia. They stopped because the antibiotic era was so powerful, they said, 'Oh, we're not going to need a vaccine. Antibiotics are going to work,' and it was just being very nearsighted,” Kreiswirth said.

He sees vaccines as a much needed secondary strategy and one where it could help greatly with resistance.

“Vaccines, even though there is so much concern about vaccines, but from a bacterial point of view, what's beautiful about vaccines, and we have a very good example, which is strep pneumonia, which saves many, many millions of people's lives, is the fact that if you develop a vaccine against the bacteria, it's agnostic to drug resistance,” Kreiswirth said. “You're not targeting resistance like we do with antibiotics. We're targeting the bacteria that's carrying the resistance. So if the vaccine works against the bacteria, resistance goes away, and that's what we should be doing.”

“Now to revisit vaccines, it's obviously much more expensive, but we do have better tools. We have better mechanisms of understanding surveillance. Whole genome sequencing allows us to really understand what strains are out there. So there's a wonderful opportunity now, from a scientific point of view and a technology point of view, to actually revisit vaccines,” he said.

Kreiswirth mentions that a colleague at National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as others are developing Klebsiella vaccines targeting urinary tract infections and bloodstream infections.

In the next episode, Thomas Dick, PhD, and Véronique Dartois, PhD, discuss research around non-TB mycobacteria and the challenges of antimicrobial development.