New Passive Immunization Techniques to Treat Whooping Cough

Pertussis, or whooping cough, is a disease that claims the lives of 195,000 children across the globe annually. Jennifer Maynard, a chemical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, is working on a better way to treat it. Her team is on the cusp of a therapeutic injection to treat the symptoms of pertussis and the painful coughing fits that come with the illness. Maynard's passive immunization techniques gives babies who've had exposure to pertussis 'instant immunity' using a mixture of two antibodies. The first binds to the whooping cough toxin, preventing it from attaching to healthy cells. The second stops the toxin from reaching its target within a healthy cell. "It gives this one-two punch to deal with the toxin," says Maynard. The therapeutic can also help babies who've contracted the disease by alleviating their symptoms, which are caused by toxin, in conjunction with antibiotics that eliminate the bacteria that causes the illness.

Transcript

00:00:08 [Music] before vaccination protestas was the number one uh killer of babies in the United States and it's still a major problem worldwide the World Health Organization estimates at 200,000 uh babies die every year from pessis so protest is also known as whooping cough and that's because of the very

00:00:35 violent body rcking coughs that an infant would have I mean your immune system is just going crazy you're getting overrun with these bacteria in your lungs so a lot of the babies who get really sick it's so sad they get it from their Grandma they get it from a caretaker um and so it's really important to get vaccinated first of all if you have a newborn baby you do not

00:00:54 want them exposed to whoop and cough you're doing everything you can to kind of cocoon them so that they aren't going to be exposed if they do get it the problem is that we don't have a lot of uh ways to help them some of the ideas that doctors approach us with is to just hydrate the babies give them oxygen help them breathe in some way um now they're doing stuff like they actually take

00:01:13 blood out of the baby system and remove some of the white blood cells that are clogging up their lungs you know having a blood transfusion and filtering the blood and doing all those things I mean this is a newborn we're talking about here right we're working as hard as we can on making some sort of therapeutic that will actually help um babies who do contract the dis disease or exposed so

00:01:32 what we have in our lab is a couple of antibodies which are molecules of the immune system which bind the pressus Toxin and help to neutralize that toxin so for these young infants that are too young to get the vaccine instead we can give them our antibodies to help combat the disease we can give a baby an injection and give them instant immunity within 5 minutes they'll have more

00:01:53 antibodies than they would have if they've been fully vaccinated and those antibodies can block the Toxin and treat all the symptoms of disease anything that is as close as we can get to mimicking like a human immune system would be the best therapy antibodies are really nice because they're very well accepted by our body because we make them all the time and we can manipulate

00:02:12 them to Target different things antibody Therapeutics can be used for cancer they can be used for um infectious disease they can be used for a variety of different problems that we encounter when I was in graduate school I was working on antibodies to neutralize Anthrax toxin I met some people who are working on pressus and they said oh well pressus is really a problem because it's

00:02:32 coming back and there's nothing we can do for it and so everything that we did with Anthrax we were able to translate to the pressus problem I really think of our research Labs as being like little startup companies but we are fortunate that we don't have to do everything by ourselves because UT gives us all of this support and infrastructure and that's what's

00:02:55 different than if you're in a company and uh being able to do whatever we want and follow what we think is important and then also take it the whole way from the beginning of the idea actually until you get to clinical trials I think we are definitely coming up with something that'll be easily implemented and will affect a lot of people across the world so we want to make sure that whatever we

00:03:15 come up with at the end is really going to have impact