Question

Why is it unlikely that there will be vaccines available for gonorrhea or chlamydia in the near future?

Answer 1

In this case, producing a vaccine against gonorrhea is unlikely because two main reasons:

1)The N. gonorrhoeae is a obligate human pathogen which means that all of the studies must be focused in the human model.

2)The group of this pathogen is highly heterogenous. This means that there are a variety of gonococcal strains.

Remember that vaccines uses the inactive pathogen or part of the pathogen in order to promote immunity against the pathogen without suffering any symptom of disease. Generally, the vaccine will promote the formation of antibodies against a specific antigen on the surface of the pathogen. However, if we have a pathogenic heterogenous group, we can not produce a vaccine that promotes the immunity for all of the strains. For this reason is so hard to produce a vaccine for these specific diseases.