AUSTRALIA —Scientists at the Queensland University of Technology are working with Harvard Medical School to come up with a vaccine to protect teenage girls from chlamydia. Dr. Michael Starnbach from Harvard is in Australia to work with QUT on a joint research project using a “mouse model” to study how the immune system responds to infections such as Chlamydia.

“Ultimately the idea is to understand enough about how Chlamydia interacts with cells and how the immune system responds to those infected cells, to be able to understand which components of the immune system need to be stimulated to fight the Chlamydia infection,” Dr. Starnbach said to Science Daily.

Dr. Starnbach said the mouse model being developed by QUT and Harvard would see the rodents genetically engineered with T-cells that were specifically directed to protect against the mouse strain of Chlamydia.

“In doing this, we will be able to learn things about what is involved in protecting mice against Chlamydia infection and then mimic those responses with vaccines,” he said.

Professor Timms of QUT said, with rates of Chlamydia infection in some Australian communities as high as 12-percent of the female population, there was a “real need” to develop a vaccine.

“Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the world and results in infertility in women and long-term chronic pelvic pain,” he said. “There are antibiotics to treat Chlamydia, but there’s no vaccine to prevent it. In many cases women don’t know they are infected because there are not really any physical signs or symptoms, so by and large they don’t get treatment.”