Acne vaccine is a step closer to reality

A vaccine that could help treat and prevent acne is a step closer to reality after scientists successfully targeted acne-causing bacteria and stopped it producing the toxins which cause inflammation.

The study was carried out by a team at the University of California in San Diego. As part of their experiments scientists sent antibodies to Propionibacterium and, for the first time, demonstrated how a type of cell that the body produces in response to a toxin secreted by bacteria on the skin can actually reduce inflammation in lesions caused by acne. 

The findings were published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology. 

“Once validated by a large-scale clinical trial, the potential impact of our findings is huge for the hundreds of millions of individuals suffering from acne vulgaris,” Chun-Ming Huang, from the Department of Dermatology at the University of California, San Diego, and the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering at the National Central University, Taiwan, said in a statement.