A Vaccine For Stomach Ulcers Might Be On The Cards, And It Could Fight Off Cancer Too

Researchers in the Philippines have announced an exciting first step towards a vaccine against stomach ulcers and cancer – but there’s still a lot of work and time to go before you can expect to get one.

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If you've found yourself noticeably stressed out in front of a boomer at some point – and let's face it, whomst among us has not – chances are they might have issued a warning. "Calm down," they may have said, "you'll give yourself an ulcer!"

Now, it's not their fault: until 1983, the received wisdom was that stomach ulcers were indeed caused by lifestyle factors such as stress, spicy food, and smoking. But ever since Barry Marshall drank that ulcer soup and purposefully infected and then cured himself of the affliction, we've known that the true cause is almost always bacterial – specifically, an overabundance of Helicobacter pylori in the stomach. 

It's a nasty little bacterium, for all that it's an ever-present one. For most people whose guts contain it, it'll do nothing – but every so often, it goes haywire, multiplying into huge colonies that can eat into your stomach lining. This causes chronic inflammation, then ulcers, and at worst, full-blown stomach cancer – a bleak outcome indeed, as this cancer currently has a 5-year survival rate as low as 7.5 percent when it's spread to distant parts of the body.

And it's not just a minor contributing factor, either. In fact, H. pylori is by far the biggest cause of stomach cancer – it's thought to cause, on its own, about three in every five cases. Some kind of vaccine against the bacterium, then, would be quite literally lifesaving. But would it be possible?

Well, if the results of the new study are to be believed, the answer is... maybe? 

“This study identified highly conserved sequences from five H. pylori virulence factors – HP-NAP, OipA, SabA, HopZ, and urease,” the paper reports. “All selected virulence factors achieved population coverage greater than 90 percent, indicating strong [immune] response potential across most populations.” 

“Among these, HopZ demonstrated the highest predicted population coverage across all three evaluated regions, suggesting the broadest [immune] response and the greatest potential efficacy for vaccine development against H. pylori-induced diseases,” it continues. “In future studies, it is recommended that further steps, such as molecular docking, be employed to refine epitope selection and finalize vaccine formulation.”

Now, you may notice that this is not the development of a vaccine – it’s more like the discovery of a really good potential recipe for a vaccine. The ingredients, if you like, were found thanks to a cutting-edge technique named “immunoinformatics” – a way of leveraging computer power to scan the genome of pathogens and pinpoint which parts are likely to be most useful in triggering immune responses in humans.

With H. pylori, they struck lucky: the technique found a handful of sequences that could potentially trigger a response in vast swathes of the population. If these results pan out in real life – and that’s still a big “if” – it could mean the first ever vaccine against one of the biggest causes of stomach ulcers and cancer.

“Ultimately [future work will] contribute to the development of safe and effective vaccines against H. pylori, addressing the pressing global health challenge presented by this bacterium,” the team predicts.

The study is published in the journal BioTechnologia.