Scientists at the University of Southampton have taken a significant and important step in keeping people safe from the most common form of meningitis in the UK.
Meningitis B (also known as Meningococcal group B or MenB) is one of the deadliest strains of meningitis. Each year, an average of 1,870 people in the UK are affected by the disease with one in 10 people dying from it.
Recently the first potentially universal MenB vaccine - Bexsero - was awarded a license for use throughout Europe, but it has been estimated that in this country, this new vaccine should protect against 73 per cent of the bacterial strains that cause the disease.
Now Dr Myron Christodoulides, Reader in Molecular Bacteriology/Microbiology at the University, and his team have discovered a potential way of protecting people against the other 27 per cent of strains of the disease.
In a study, published in mBio today (26 February 2013), the University of Southampton team discovered that a MenB protein called the Adhesin Complex Protein (ACP) is a new molecule that the MenB bacterium uses to stick to human cells.