Thursday, October 06, 2011
Researchers Sander Boekschoten and Michael Müller of the Netherlands Nutrigenomics Centre are the co-authors of a recent Nature paper on an important breakthrough in making vaccines safer and more effective.
According to the study, vaccination with dead bacteria can be just as effective as with live bacteria, provided RNA from live bacteria has been added to the dead pathogenic organism. The work is a collaborative effort of scientists in the USA, France and the Netherlands.
Vaccination with dead bacteria gives less effective immunity probably because the dead non-pathogenic bacteria do not contain the substance that the immune system recognises and remembers.
read more (in Dutch)