I wrote to Dr. Huang, the University of California San Diego doctor coordinating research on a potential acne vaccine. He is a great guy and spent a long time with me, answering all of my questions. Here’s what I found out:

- First of all, before we get excited, a vaccine, should it happen, is still ten years away he says. This is because scientists stopped work on the first P. acnes vaccine. They had too much concern that P. acnes may be beneficial to our bodies in some way to justify killing it off. Instead they have turned to working on a vaccine that targets a toxin that the P. acnes bacteria secretes. This toxin is called the CAMP factor. The new hope is that they can turn off this CAMP factor toxin using a novel new approach to making vaccines called proteomics which deals with protein markers on cell surfaces.

- The team produced and successfully treated mice with an initial CAMP factor vaccine. When I asked, “so if the same results you’ve seen in mice occurred in humans, would this be a cure for acne?” Dr. Huang responded with a quick and confident, “Oh yes.” That got me excited of course, but this is a big if. Dr. Huang went on to say that there is no good animal model for an acne vaccine because animals do not produce the sebum (skin oil) that humans produce, which is so integral in the formation of acne. So it remains to be seen whether humans experience similar results.

- The next step is for the doctors to detoxify the vaccine before starting a human clinical trial. They also need to fund such a trial. Clinical trials are long, expensive processes. This vaccine’s clinical trial process will likely go on for a decade and cost in the millions of dollars. If you know anyone who might be interested in funding the research, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Dr. Huang.

Please respond with any questions you have and I’ll try to pass along as many of them as I can to Dr. Huang.

Recently I made the decision that acne just needs to be cured. So I started research in that vein, and I found that in 2001, scientists started work on an acne vaccine. More specifically, it is an anti-P.acnes bacteria vaccine. Since P. acnes is the bacteria implicated in acne formation and is a major culprit in acne development, if we can somehow turn off its genetic expression, the hope is that we can prevent or cure acne.

A brief history of the vaccine: A company called Corixa worked with a French company to decode the 2.8 milion base pairs that make up the P. acnes genome back in 2001. They then started working on identifying antigens in order to create a vaccine. Glaxo Smith Kline acquired Corixa in 2005. From there, mention of the vaccine seemed to fall off the map, until an article published in 2008 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology surfaced. The article outlined research at the University of California San Diego in which scientists developed vaccines against P. acnes and successfully used the vaccine in both mice and in the lab using human sebum (skin oil) cells.

The trail seems to end there again. I’m in the process of contacting the researchers at UCSD to get more information. I find this area of work fascinating. I’ll keep you posted on anything I uncover. For now, let’s not get our hopes up too much however. Acne development is multi-faceted. While P. acnes plays a part, it is unknown how much it directly causes the other factors in acne development such as pores becoming clogged, oil overproduction, or inflammation.