Amongst uncertainty over what bacteria is lurking in flooded waters in hurricane-ravaged Florida and Texas, researchers may be on the verge of developing a new method to treat diseases caused by Group A Streptococcus, a common species of bacteria that can lead to strep throat, acute rheumatic heart disease, and even flesh-eating disease.
Researchers at Houston Methodist have discovered a critical target for the development of a potential Group A Streptococcus vaccine or antibiotic to combat it.
“Group A streptococcus infections are pretty widespread,” Muthiah Kumaraswami, Ph.D., an infectious diseases researcher at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, said in a statement. “If you don’t treat strep throat in children, for instance, recurring infections can lead to those more serious diseases and are very difficult to treat. We don’t have a vaccine, so basic research is geared toward finding targets for vaccine development.”
By manipulating the target, the researchers believe they can either reduce the severity of the infections or clear them up faster.
The researchers found a peptide secreted by the bacteria that signals its neighbors to produce a toxin–streptococcal pyrogenic exotoxin B (SpeB)—which is critical for the development of the flesh-eating disease necrotizing fasciitis.
By blocking the toxin, they may be able to prevent or treat the disease.
“Researchers have known for more than 100 years that Group A strep uses the toxin SpeB and that it is crucial to disease development,” Kumaraswami said. “We did not know, however, what signals the timely production of SpeB by Group A streptococcus.
“Now that we have discovered how Group A strep bacteria communicate with each other to coordinate the production of this toxin, we can target the signaling pathway for vaccine and antimicrobial development.”
The communication codes of bacteria have been characterized for a long-time, but the researchers were able to discover the nature of the language.
“Typically, the signal is quite long and has a number of characteristic features,” Kumaraswami said. “The signal we found is compact and doesn’t have many of what we traditionally see in other bacterial peptides, which is probably what contributed to the difficulties in finding it for such a long time.
“There could be similar atypical signals in other bacteria that have been overlooked, as well, so we believe the discovery of this peptide will likely facilitate discovering additional bacterial peptide signals in other pathogens.”
The researchers can now focus on developing antibodies to target it or a competing peptide to jam the communication path, allowing them to block toxin production and reduce the severity of the disease. They can also trigger the toxin production at the early stage, where the toxin level would be minimal and the host’s immune response would be triggered and clear the bacterial infection much earlier.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.