Bacterial vaccines

What are Bacterial vaccines?

Bacterial vaccines contain killed or attenuated bacteria that activate the immune system. Antibodies are built against that particular bacteria, and prevents bacterial infection later. An example of a bacterial vaccine is the Tuberculosis vaccine.

Generally, mainly four types of vaccines against bacterial infections are in use today: inactivated bacterial pathogens (whole cell antigen (WCA)), live attenuated bacterial vaccines (LAV), toxoid and subunit vaccines, and polysaccharide conjugate vaccines.

Although some live attenuated vaccine strains have been licensed for oral administration, such as the typhoid vaccine S. typhi Ty21a and the Mycobacterium bovis vaccine BCG, Vibrio cholerae CVD103-HgR (Levine et al., 1988) remains as the only recombinant live oral vaccine licensed until now.

Currently, five main groups of bacterial vaccines are available: whole-cell antigen (WCA), polysaccharide/protein conjugates; recombinant proteins including toxoids; live attenuated vaccines (LAV); and, more recently introduced, bacterial outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) (Jiskoot et al., 2019).

According to the National Library of Medicine MeSH descriptor data (MeSH, 2002), a bacterial vaccine is defined as a suspension of bacteria, attenuated or killed, or their antigenic derivatives administered to induce an immune response for the prevention or treatment of bacterial disease.