We just got closer than ever to a working Chlamydia vaccine

After more than fifty years of trying, a potential new chlamydia vaccine has at last reached phase 1 clinical trials. Not only was the vaccine found to be safe and well-tolerated when administered to humans, it was also able to provoke a distinct immune response. While this does not necessarily suggest full protection from chlamydia, researchers say these are promising early signs. “Given the impact of the chlamydia epidemic on women’s health, reproductive health, infant health through vertical transmission, and increased susceptibility to other sexually transmitted diseases, a global unmet medical need exists for a vaccine against genital chlamydia,” says immunologist Peter Andersen from the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark. This is a hole that scientists have been trying to fill for decades with no success. The first attempts to create a chlamydia vaccine began way back in the 1960s, when researchers tried to produce a number of vaccines using the bacterium itself,...