Barry Marshall, the Australian scientist who won a Nobel Prize for
identifying a cancer-causing stomach bacterium, said the bug may one day be
used in a commercial food product to protect against influenza.

Marshall and colleagues at closely held Ondek Ltd, the company he helped
found, plan to give a genetically modified form of the Helicobacter pylori
bug to humans this year in the first round of trials, he said June 4 at a
vaccine conference in Singapore.

If the tests are successful, the scientist plans to develop the technique to
create a product similar to the fermented milk drinks sold in supermarkets
by Yakult Honsha Co. The approach may one day be used in foods that trigger
immune responses to fight other diseases such as malaria, or for the
treatment of diabetes or obesity, he said.

`Ultimately I don't think that it will be necessary to have prescriptions or
doctors or injections or anything like that for this type of vehicle,''
Marshall said at the World Vaccine Congress.

About half of the world's population is infected with H. pylori, according
to the World Health Organization. Most people carry the bug without being
aware or developing symptoms. H. pylori is to blame for about 90 percent of
gastric ulcers and stomach cancers.

Immune Response
While H. pylori stimulates the body's immune system to produce antibodies,
the bug is capable of evading these and continues to reproduce in the lining
of the stomach. Marshall plans to use this activity as a way of delivering a
flu vaccine. If it works, the technique could also be used to deliver
insulin to diabetics or appetite suppressants to treat obesity, he said.

`It's a bloody good idea, but it would need a lot of work to find out
whether you could actually get it to work in practice,'' said Robin Warren,
who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for medicine with Marshall for their
discovery of H. pylori. `To start off with, you'd have to convince medical
people and governments that it's safe to give people doses of live
helicobacter bacteria,'' Warren said by phone from Perth yesterday.

Studies in mice showed rodents infected with a modified, flu- carrying form
of H. pylori colonized the animals' stomachs for more than 100 days and
successfully generated antibodies to fight the virus, Marshall said.

He and colleagues plan to take samples of H. pylori from healthy volunteers,
treat the subjects with antibiotics to rid their stomachs of the bacteria,
then reinfect them with their own bugs to see how their immune systems
respond. If successful, Marshall will progress to another round of trials in
which he attaches flu virus genes to the bacteria.

Scientists at the Stockholm, Sweden-based Karolinska Institutet are working
to identify `safe strains'' of the bacterium that pose the lowest risk of
causing ulcers and cancer, Marshall said.

`Obviously we don't have the resources to do safety studies in 300,000
subjects, so we'll definitely be looking for big partners as time goes by,
but that will be probably a couple of years from now,'' he said.

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