title: Do Helicobacter pylori therapeutic vaccines need to be tailored to the age of the recipient?
abstract: Helicobacter pylori infections typically commence during childhood and last for life. Freire de Melo and colleagues compared cytokine profiles in the stomachs of H. pylori-infected and H. pylori-uninfected children and adults from Brazil. They suggest that the immune effector response in infected children differs from infected adults, specifically that stomachs of infected children contained elevated regulatory T-cell markers and less IL-17 compared with adults. As vaccine-mediated protection against H. pylori is believed to involve IL-17 and to be inhibited by regulatory T cells, this raises the possibility that individual H. pylorivaccines may have different efficacies in children and adults.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Animal Biotechnology, School of Veterinary Science, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia. phil.sutton@mcri.edu.au
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sutton
authors.forename: Karen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Robinson