A Review of Research of Vaccine against Meningococcal Disease

Background: Meningococcal disease as a worldwide health problem causes approximately 1.2 million cases of bacterial meningitis, annually. Neisseria meningitidis a major cause of bacterial meningitis and serious diseases such as sepsis and bacteremia is fatal, and despite antibiotic treatments, the mortality rate of about 135 thousand cases has been reported. Meningococcal pathogen has been detected in nasopharynx of about 10-40% of the healthy people. There are several vaccines against six major groups of bacteria A, B, C, W135, X and Y. Although the bivalent (C-B), trivalent (A-C-Y) and quadrivalent (A-C-Y-W135) vaccines are used these days, there are yet significant rates of the disease in different geographical areas. Conclusion: Although the polysaccharide capsule conjugate vaccine that have been developed against meningococcal serogroups A-C-Y and W135 are successful, but serogroup B because of the similarity with human polysialic glycoproteins is poorly immunogenic and to be cross-reactions. Thus, vaccines based on outer membrane vesicles have been designed for them.