Short answer: yes.
Longer answer:
The ability of the immune system to identify "foreign" material
depends upon it having in its antigen receptor library something that
will bind specifically to the "foreign" object. Vaccines work by
exposing the immune system to one or many foreign antigens to elicit a
primary response and engender a more rapid response upon subsequent
exposure through greatly enhancing the number of immune system cells
that carry the necessary receptor.
So - for a vaccine to work, it must provide the same antigens as the
normal invasive pathogen. In the scenario you describe, it is
possible that in the "denaturing" of the bacterium during vaccine
production, novel antigens might be produced that, while they elicit
an immune response, are not actually carried by the normal pathogen,
since they are an artifact of production.
It is a bit of a lottery, but bear in mind that the entire immune
system library will swarm over all parts of the vaccine. If ANY
epitopre is present in the vaccine that is also present in the native
pathogen, then the vaccine is likely to be effective. It may have
inflammatory side-effects however.
The trick is to use a method to kill the bacteria to be used for the
vaccine without altering the chemical, or indeed conformational,
properties of potential antigens. Numerous antimetabolic antibiotics
would probably do the job, even a low level of detergent may be
sufficient to lyse the cell without overly denaturing any potential
antigens. Irradiation would probably work, as would fracturing the
cells by ultrasonics or freezing. Heating, oxidative, fixative-based
methods are less likely to work. |
