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Review
. 2018 Feb 25;6(1):12.
doi: 10.3390/vaccines6010012.

Meningococcal Vaccines: Current Status and Emerging Strategies

Pumtiwitt C McCarthy  1 , Abeer Sharyan  2 , Laleh Sheikhi Moghaddam  3
Affiliations
Review

Meningococcal Vaccines: Current Status and Emerging Strategies

Pumtiwitt C McCarthy et al. Vaccines (Basel). .

Abstract

Neisseria meningitidis causes most cases of bacterial meningitis. Meningococcal meningitis is a public health burden to both developed and developing countries throughout the world. There are a number of vaccines (polysaccharide-based, glycoconjugate, protein-based and combined conjugate vaccines) that are approved to target five of the six disease-causing serogroups of the pathogen. Immunization strategies have been effective at helping to decrease the global incidence of meningococcal meningitis. Researchers continue to enhance these efforts through discovery of new antigen targets that may lead to a broadly protective vaccine and development of new methods of homogenous vaccine production. This review describes current meningococcal vaccines and discusses some recent research discoveries that may transform vaccine development against N. meningitidis in the future.

Keywords: Neisseria meningitidis; glycoconjugate vaccines; protein-based vaccines; vaccine development.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Chemical structures of monosaccharide units of meningococcal polysaccharides for which there are currently glycoconjugate vaccines. Sites of potential O-acetylation is indicated by R groups. The monosaccharide symbols follow the Symbol Nomenclature for Glycans (SNFG) according to [49].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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