Can bladder vaccines treat UTIs and keep them from coming back?

There is a heightened risk of urinary tract infection (UTI) in individuals with a spinal cord injury (SCI) with lower rates occurring in those with incomplete injuries. The overall incidence of UTI in SCI is 2.5 cases per year. UTIs are caused by bacteria getting into the urinary tract, sometimes making it up into the bladder, where they can be hard to treat. Most of the time they require antibiotics taken either orally or intravenously, which can have the side effects of being system-wide carpet bombs. Worse still, these methods often don’t destroy the whole population of invaders in the bladder, paving the way for infections to return. Now, researchers at Duke University have developed a vaccine that can be delivered via catheter to clear out the bacteria and prevent infections from recurring.

For the new study, the Duke researchers set out to investigate a more direct approach. In previous work, the team found that the reason bacteria stick around is because the immune system sends in more Th2 cells, which focus on repairing damaged tissue, rather than the Th1 cells that target bacterial pathogens. You can read more about this study HERE.