A vaccine against gas gangrene has been successfully tested on animals
at Britain’s Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down,
Wiltshire. The treatment should also give protection against certain biological
warfare agents.
Gas gangrene is a hideous infection of serious wounds that has killed
and maimed millions of soldiers over the centuries. It gets its name from
the foul-smelling gases emanating from infected tissue. ‘In the First World
War, several hundred thousand soldiers died of gas gangrene,’ says Richard
Titball, head of microbiological research at the CBDE. He and colleagues
have developed a vaccine that blocks the lethal effects of Clostridium perfringens,
the bacterium that causes most cases of gas gangrene. In trials on animals,
the vaccine stopped the spread of infection.
The bacterium is widespread, and can colonise the human gut, where it
is harmless. It thrives in airless conditions, and rapidly colonises wounded
tissues deprived of blood-borne oxygen. There it produces a protein called
alpha toxin, which penetrates and kills surrounding healthy tissue. ‘It
spreads very rapidly, and can turn a whole limb black within a few hours,’
says Titball. ‘Bacteria in the limb increase until they have poisoned the
whole body.’ The protein is the active element in some biological warfare
agents.
Prompt use of antibiotics can halt the development of gangrene, but
once it becomes established the only treatment is removal of dead tissue,
which usually means amputation. Every year, hundreds of people around the
world lose limbs or die from the effects of gangrene.
Advertisement
The CBDE’s genetically engineered vaccine works by priming the body’s
immune system to make antibodies that mop up the toxin, preventing it from
spreading to healthy tissue.
The vaccine is based on a harmless fragment of the toxin. Titball and
his colleagues synthesised a gene carrying the instructions for making the
fragment, and inserted it into Escherichia coli bacteria. The bacteria were
then able to make the fragment in large enough amounts for testing.
The Ministry of Defence has applied for a worldwide patent for the vaccine,
and the CBDE is seeking business partners to scale up production.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
