Blocking Every Bug.

The article cites a study, conducted by Craig Rubens and colleagues of Children's Hospital in Seattle, Washington, which used a new strategy to develop a vaccine that protects mice from multiple variants of the Group B streptococcus (GBS), which kills around 100 newborns in the U.S. each year. GBS bacteria live in the genital tracts of about a quarter of healthy women. Those infected experience few problems, but their children can develop sepsis, meningitis, or pneumonia if they contract the bug during birth. To make the new vaccine, the researchers first sequenced the complete genome of eight GBS strains. Then a computer program identified 589 proteins likely to be on the surface of the bacterium, where they could be detected by the immune system.