A NEW CLASS OF VACCINES

    While there are few major infections of humans caused by bacteria in the USA and other first world countries, these diseases kill millions each year in the underdeveloped areas of the world - TB, cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and infant diarrhea. Develop a vaccine that cuts deaths due to these by just 1% will mean you will be saving and additional number of lives that perhaps exceeds the number of lives your own doctor has saved in his or her whole life. Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine: "If you want to save lives by the millions, invent a new vaccine."

    In most anti-bacterial vaccines, heat-killed bacteria are injected into the body so as to trigger the immune response. The efficacy of these vaccines is limited because the body quickly clears itself of these antigens - often so fast that the antibody generators do not rev up fast enough to provide a good and long-lasting immunity. It is proposed that if the injected bacteria were not dead they would continue to struggle and produce their antigens for a much longer period of time. BUT, of course, the live bacteria would cause the disease, wouldn't they, and then jeopardize the patient's life? But not if the bacteria had a temperature-sensitive (ts) gene for making DNA-polymerase. Then the bacteria could not divide inside the body, but could continue to struggle anyway. Such work for this summer, of course, would all be in vitro. Such ts-mutants have been used for years for other purposes and are readily available. Pursuit of this mission will require not only lots of plate counts, but also a number of different biochemical tests of the bacteria involving many of the most common types of "detective" media, IMViC, etc.