The world needs a staph vaccine—new research could bring it a step closer

In the spring of 2011, pharmaceutical giant Merck and its collaborators learned that a data monitoring committee was calling for a halt of their phase 3 clinical trial. The vaccine candidate they had built against Staphylococcus aureus—the leading cause of death by bacterial infection worldwide—and had tested among 8000 patients across 26 countries wasn’t effective enough to move forward. “That was the start of it, but that wasn’t the end of it,” said Vance Fowler, MD, MHS, an infectious disease specialist at Duke Health and a lead investigator for the trial. A deeper look at the data over the following year brought troubling news for the shuttered study, which had tested the vaccine candidate in patients undergoing cardiothoracic surgery. Participants in the trial who developed an S aureus infection were more likely to die if they had received the vaccine than if they had gotten the placebo shot. Many of the vaccine...