Clinical results indicate vaccine candidate highly efficacious against bacterial diarrhea

Vaccine/adjuvant combination against a leading cause of bacterial diarrhea shows great promise for saving children’s lives New results from a safety and immunogenicity study, which included a challenge phase to test efficacy, indicate that a live attenuated enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli(ETEC) vaccine candidate, given in combination with a novel adjuvant, provided significant protection against disease. This represents the first efficacy data for this vaccine/adjuvant combination, which was 58.5 percent efficacious in protecting against diarrhea of any severity using a highly rigorous ETEC human challenge model. The vaccine/adjuvant combination was also protective against severe ETEC diarrhea in this model with a protective efficacy of 65.9 percent. Each year, nearly 600,000 children die from severe, dehydrating diarrhea and millions more are hospitalized, mostly in low-resource countries. ETEC may be the first enteric illness encountered by many infants, and it causes several hundred million cases of diarrhea each year, mainly in children. This high rate of...