New nose drop helps fight meningitis

Doctors in Southampton have developed a pioneering nose drop containing a type of ‘friendly’ bacteria that could help prevent meningitis and other infections.

Professor Robert Read, director of the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, and his team have inserted a gene into a harmless bacterium that will be able to live inside the nose. It is hoped that this bacteria will protect against the bacterial species responsible for causing a severe type of meningitis.

Around 10 per cent of adults carry Neisseria meningitides in the back of their nose and throat with no signs or symptoms.

However, this bacterium can invade the bloodstream in some people and cause life-threatening infections including meningitis and septicaemia.

If successful, the nose drop would offer the potential to prevent the spread of infection or the ability to rapidly control an outbreak as meningococcal meningitis cannot develop in the absence of Neisseria meningitides.

When trials begin at the NIHR Southampton Clinical Research Facility, it will be the first time a genetically modified bacteria has been used in this way to prevent infections that develop in the nose and throat.

Read and his team have applied to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) for permission to use the genetically-modified drop in volunteers.

It is hoped the study will be underway by the end of the year.

It is being run in collaboration with Public Health England and funded by the Medical Research Council.

Read said: “We have already shown that placing Nlac in the nose of healthy adults caused no harm to the volunteers, the bacteria settled and it caused an immune response which we believe could prevent the acquisition of harmful bacteria.

“Now, following extensive work in the laboratory, we have developed a nose drop which includes Nlac that has been enhanced with a gene to help broaden its effect to, we hope, exclude N. meningitidis.

“The next stage of this process is to test the drops on healthy volunteers in a clinical trial to ensure the strain of bacteria we have created is going to stay and grow in the nose.

“If successful then we will have a future therapy that we can adapt to combat other diseases caused by bacteria that breed in the nasal pathway such as pneumonia and ear disease.”