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Chinese Scientists Are Developing A Vaccine Against Cavities (nature.com)
A vaccine against tooth decay "is urgently needed" writes Nature -- and a team of Chinese scientists is getting close. hackingbear writes:
Scientists at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences developed low side effects and high protective efficiency using flagellin-rPAc fusion protein KFD2-rPAc, a promising vaccine candidate. In rat challenge models, KFD2-rPAc induces a robust rPAc-specific IgA response, and confers efficient prophylactic and therapeutic efficiency as does KF-rPAc, while the flagellin-specific inflammatory antibody responses are highly reduced.
I thought that cavities were the result of bacteria breaking down leftover food in the mouth and that the bacteria doesn't attack the teeth itself, but rather byproducts of the metabolic process that the bacteria use to eat lead to decay of tooth enamel. Perhaps I have an incomplete (or outright incorrect) understanding, because if that's the case, just using some mouth wash periodically would be just as effective as a lot of that is anti-bacterial in addition to containing fluoride that can bond with your enamel to help repair damages.
The heart disease link is certainly interesting and that's something I've never heard of before. Might you have some literature regarding that?
Vaccination (challenging the immune system with a substance related to the pathogen, to promote directed response, such as antibody generation) is a class of immunizations that works fine against both viruses and bacteria, and to varying degrees to other components of disease processes. Diptheriia, tetanus, and whooping cough, for example, are all bacterial diseases.
Vaccination originally meant the specific challenge of a deliberate infection with cowpox virus (ariolae vaccinae) to promote immunity to the related smallpox virus. It has since been applied to other immunizations that involve a challenge with a related substance or a component of a killed pathogen (but not the live pathogen itself - which is "innoculation"). This usage was promoted by Pasteur, in order to honor Jenner, who developed the smallpox vaccination.
Antibodies from the blood pass freely into saliva and remain active there, so an immunization against dental caries bacteria has been known to be possible for decades. But tooth decay bacteria are a problem for vaccine development.
They avoid the immune system by displaying surface proteins that are similar to those on the heart. This both reduces the immune systems willingness to attack them and leads to autoimmune attacks on the heart and circulatory system if the immune system DOES go after them. (This is why dentists may prescribe prophylactic antibiotic doses before certain procedures that are likely to result in decay bacteria being transferred to the bloodstream.)
Before molecular biology, vaccines were typically made by growing the pathogen, killing it, and producing a sterile, injectable, mixture containing its components (along with an irritant to convince the immune system there's something that needs its attention). Doing this with dental caries would lead to heart problems, so tooth decay vaccines have not been pursued until recently.
By selecting a conserved (doesn't change much because it has to be this way to work) surface component (so the bug will have trouble evolving away from susceptibility to the immunization) that does NOT look to the immune system like some part of the body, and using that as the challenge agent, it should be possible to come up with an immunization to the common tooth decay bacteria.
Which seems to be what is being done here.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I am an actual archaeologist and you wouldn't believe the state some of the prehistoric skulls we find are in. With some of the things I've seen I can only surmise that apparently they didn't know to pull teeth when the situation got out of hand. I'm talking teeth rotten completely away taking big parts of the jaw with them, showing signs of partial healing so the individual must have suffered from it for quite a long time. Usually we keep skulls like that in depot because visitors don't like them, but sometimes there's hardly a complete skull available from a site.