Guangming Zhong, MD, PhD, Professor at UT Health San Antonio talks about the chlamydia virus and a potential vaccine him and his team may have found.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in May 2018.
What you’ve got here is still in the experimental stage preemptive to actually getting Chlamydia. So is it similar to say the HPV vaccine?
Dr. Zhong: Yeah. It’s a vaccine concept. If you are exposed to Chlamydia in the GI tract first by whatever route oral uptake or rectually then likely you are immunized against subsequent Chlamydia exposure in any other places in the genital tract or in the eye or in the airway.
So you’re talking about orally ingesting the Chlamydia?
Dr. Zhong: Right.
But when it gets in to the gut the gut kind of straightens it out on where it’s going to go?
Dr. Zhong: They stay in the gut, primarily in the colon, for a long, long time without causing any trouble. Now we’re studying it, they are part of our colon microbiology.
Even though everything is in the same general area, the colon and genital, urinary tract, in the colon it doesn’t do anything but what does it do in the system?
Dr. Zhong: Okay. Once out of the colon if you locate the Chlamydia outside of the GI Tract, any other places including the genital tract, Chlamydia is a foreign particle to the tissue. Chlamydia will induce inflammation. You can say that the tissue outside of the GI tract recognize Chlamydia as a foreign particle they mount inflammation response to try to reject the Chlamydia. That is the cause of problems.
It’s causing the inflammation which is then causing the problem. So the inflammation like you showed us on the computer can heavily impact the ovaries and the tubes.
Dr. Zhong: Right. During the acute phase Chlamydia arrive at the genital tract and it will induce inflammatory response and normally they go off the response from the human tissue point of view is to clear Chlamydia infection. And this kind of fight. Chlamydia is there and the genital tract doesn’t like it and they mount host response and try to kill Chlamydia and Chlamydia try to fight back. But after a few weeks or months then Chlamydia will lose the fight. After that Chlamydia will be cleared by your system.
People a lot of times don’t even know that they have it.
Dr. Zhong: The inflammation is so mild they don’t hardly cause any clinical symptoms. You’re not aware of it. It does not cause any high fever or any uncomfortableness to yourself. Some nonspecific symptoms and people mistake oh, maybe something else is going wrong. So they don’t seek treatment because no typical symptoms of the chronic Chlamydia infection. That’s one of the challenges when you try to treat Chlamydia. Actually if you take antibiotics, antibiotics is very effective in curing Chlamydia infection.
But inside it’s really doing a lot of damage to your internal organs.
Dr. Zhong: Right. There’s war going on there, between Chlamydia and the tissue.
There’s war going on. So what you showed us on there where you could see where the tissue looked like essentially it was gone.
Dr. Zhong: Right. That’s the sequela of the wall yeah. It’s bilateral damage, the wall is the inflammation is to clear the Chlamydia infection at the same time inflammation is a weapon, it also causes tissue damage. Left over what we saw is a war zone, the enemy is gone but you suffered damage also.
So what you’re doing right now with the mice for example; how do you inject it in to them and what are you hoping to prove and how long will it take?
Dr. Zhong: Studying how Chlamydia causes the disease in women is almost impossible to study in the human body. We use mouse as models. On purpose we inoculate a mouse Chlamydia strain in to mouse genital tract and then study how mouse Chlamydia migrate or is sent from the vagina, at the cervix to cervix, to uterine horn. And then during that process we found something strange going on. We layer the Chlamydia with a florescent pack. And then when we follow the Chlamydia ascending we don’t have to kill the mice anymore. We’re just using regular imaging. There is a machine for us to watch Chlamydia signal from the genital to uterine horn. And then normally we know that Chlamydia infection in the mice model lasts about a one month or so. And then Chlamydia is killed by the host and then left over with pathology damage in the genital tract but when we tract mice they emit a florescent signal inside of the mice. One month later when we’re still looking at the signal very surprisingly we saw the signal still in the lower abdominal area of the mice. At first we thought the signal may not be specifically from the Chlamydia and later on when we sacrificed the mice, take out organ, put in the Petri dish to actually re-image it to see where the signal come from we found indeed the Chlamydia signal does not come from their genital tract any more it come from the GI tract, it comes from colon, that really struck me in surprise. I thought something had gone wrong with our system. So we went back to repeat the experiment and make sure the mice did not eat their own secretion and then did a lot of control experiment. Now we know Chlamydia when the Chlamydia entered the genital tract it migrated in to the GI tract through the secretion system. And the first site it arrived at the GI tract is not colored up to the stomach. And then through descending and then they land in the colon for a long time.
It doesn’t do any damage?
Dr. Zhong: It doesn’t do any damage yet. Stays still.
It seems as it laid it’s everywhere, everything is stirring right there. But you were so surprised when you found that out in this case because you thought it was genitally related. So what is the thing going on in their gut, what is it doing?
Dr. Zhong: Okay. We don’t know the precise mechanism but based on the experiment results, we already have a hypothesis. We think that Chlamydia evolutionary has been select as a microbial species in the GI tract as normal. And if you think of animal species they come in the ships, the most effective transmission route is oral fecal. They poo on the grass and they eat the same grass. That allows the Chlamydia to talk to the GI tract very well, we’re just not aware of this. And when they jump to human it’s because our human sexual behavior and the artificially inoculated Chlamydia in the genital tract because all the fecal route is cut off in humans. They’re most efficient way of mucosa transmission probably there’s always sexual contact. That and the human behavior force the Chlamydia to adapt to the human mucosa tissue in the genital tract. But it’s not fully adapted yet. That’s why Chlamydia in the genital tract is asymptomatic but it still causes low level inflammation. But I think many years later Chlamydia in humans in the genital tract may also give you enough time for them to adapt.
Estimate a time frame from research to where somebody is being vaccinated against the Chlamydia before it happens.
Dr. Zhong: That’s hard to say. But in animal models in mice we have strong enough evidence to show that if you’re exposed to Chlamydia in the gut first you’re essentially vaccinated against the subsequent exposure. But if this can be translated in humans this can be done right away. But we don’t know whether human Chlamydia interaction with human bodies follow the same biology as mouse Chlamydia in mice. We don’t know this yet. The first step is that we go back to recent knowledge we have from mice which is go back to human population. And then find out whether human Chlamydia can spread from the genital to the GI. And the way that some humans when they are first exposed to Chlamydia through the oral which is possible because oral sex, anal sex allow those individuals to acquire Chlamydia first in the GI tract. Whether those individuals become more resistant to subsequent infection in the genital tract that’s the first epidemiologic study we want to do. Actually I’m writing a grant to try to propose this.
Did I leave anything out that you want to say?
Dr. Zhong: That’s pretty much it.
END OF INTERVIEW
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