Dr Nicole De Nisco, assistant professor of biological sciences, and Dr Jeremiah Gassensmith, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, recently demonstrated the use of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to encapsulate and inactivate whole bacterial cells to create a "depot" that allowed the vaccines to last longer in the body.

"Patients are losing their bladders to save their lives because the bacteria cannot be killed by antibiotics or because of an extreme allergy to antibiotics, which is more common in the older population than people may realize," De Nisco added.

"Afterward, we talked about my research group's idea of creating better whole-cell vaccines by preserving antigens in this slow-release depot," Gassensmith said.

Consequently, using the entire cell is preferable to choosing just a piece of a bacterium, Gassensmith said.

"Vaccines using whole-cell dead bacteria haven't succeeded because the cells typically don't last long enough in the body to produce long-term, durable immune responses," Gassensmith said.

"That's the reason for our MOF antigen depot: It allows an intact, dead pathogen to exist in tissue longer, as if it were an infection, in order to trigger a full-scale immune system response," he added.

"When we challenged these mice with a lethal injection of bacteria, after they were vaccinated, almost all of our animals survived, which is a much better performance than with traditional vaccine approaches," Gassensmith said.

"This study on UTI was proof of the concept that whole-cell vaccines are more effective in this extreme, lethal-sepsis model," De Nisco said.