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   Bacteria that cause meningitis, a sometimes deadly inflammation of the brain's lining inclined to strike college students, work like a stealth bomber, Eric Vimr says.
   A coating or capsule of sugar molecules around bacteria, such as Neisseria meningitidis and E. coli K1, fools the body into thinking bacterial infections in the bloodstream are part of normal operations, the professor at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine said recently.
   As a result, the body's defenses don't kick in, allowing the infection – which might be easily flushed if detected – opportunity to spread.
   “It's flying in under the radar of the host's immune system,” said Vimr, a microbiology and immunology professor whose research focuses on how bacteria put together the molecular components important to disease.
   Vimr, UI colleague Carol Lichtensteiger and Willie Vann, a federal Food and Drug Administration scientist, think they may have a better way to pierce the veil created by the sugar molecule chains, called polysaccharides, and to vaccinate people against meningitis and perhaps other diseases.
   Their idea is to use the benign tetanus toxin used in vaccines against tetanus, or lockjaw, as a platform for attaching benign components of meningitis-causing bacteria, in order to prepare the body's immune system to recognize the polysaccharides as a problem.
   An international scientific review panel for the Meningitis Research Foundation, which last month agreed to fund a two-year study of the idea, called it “innovative and ingenious.”
   Vimr said the tetanus toxin is a good platform for genetically engineering in the meningitis bacteria components. Scientists understand its structure well, and only one part of it needs to be preserved to retain its effectiveness as a vaccine against tetanus.
   The toxin also is readily recognized by the body, said Lichtensteiger, a veterinary pathologist who will handle the statistical work in the study.
   “The immune system responds to it well,” she said.
   The new vaccine, which could take 5 to 10 years to reach the market, also would provide a double whammy, protection against both tetanus and meningitis. That would be of particular benefit in underdeveloped nations where both are widespread killers and vaccination opportunities are limited.
   In the United States, meningitis is prone to strike college students because they're a concentrated population with a tendency toward behavior that passes the bacteria, like sharing drinks and kissing, and behavior that weakens the body's immune response, for example poor diets, not getting enough sleep and stress over school work.
   The UI has had its own periodic outbreaks, including three deaths in 1991-92 from a total of nine cases involving UI and Parkland College students. One death occurred at Eastern Illinois University in 1999.
   While deaths are uncommon in meningitis cases and can usually be prevented by treatment, Vimr said, 50 percent to 60 percent of the survivors suffer “deficits” such as hearing loss or blindness. In very young children, mental retardation may result.
   Though aimed at meningitis, the research also may move scientists toward a vaccination for sepsis, or bacterial blood poisoning, which strikes an estimated 750,000 people nationwide each year and causes 225,000 deaths. The death rate is 30 percent to 50 percent.
   Sepsis and meningitis both stem from bacterial blood infections, and from bacteria using the same sugar-coating trick to mask themselves. Information on how to attack one may be applicable to the other, Vimr said.
   The researchers also hope to use the study to advance the science of creating vaccines against more than one disease, called conjugates. Vimr said that might eventually lead to a single vaccination for three, four or more diseases.
   
You can reach Greg Kline at (217) 351-5215 or via e-mail at kline@news-gazette.com.