Amoeba vaccine!

When Spaniards invaded and captured Mexico in the early 16th century, they face an unexpected form of resistance: life threatening dysentery, which they called “Montezuma’s revenge”. Amoebic disease today claims the lives of thousands years and afflicts millions and more, mainly in impoverished communities.
Unfortunately, the means to fight amoebic disease remain very limited. Because affected populations usually reside on poor countries, pharmaceutical company does not have sufficient economic incentive to invest in developing new therapies. Now a team at the weizmann institute of science, Israel have succeeded in engineering an amoeba that could became the basis for a pioneering vaccines against amoebic disease.
Prof. Carlos gitter discovered that amoeba kills human cells by infecting a small protein into their membranes. He called this protein an amoeba pore; and the phenomenon was termed, “the amoeba Kiss of death”. He hoped to produce antibiotics that would be used against the amoebapore. However the antibiotics proved ineffective because they could not reach the amoebapore, which passed directly from the amoebas into the intestinal cells with out being exposed.
David Mirelamn and team members Rivka Bracha and Yeael Nachamawtz isolated the gene encoding the amoebapore, made a copy of the gene encoding the amoebapore, and reversed the orientation of components. They then introduced the reversed gene into the amoeba, creating an organism that carries both the original (“Sense”) amoebapore gene and the antisense gene. When the original amoebapore gene starts getting expressed, the anti-sense gene does the same. The resulting messenger RNAs fit together perfectly, clinging to reach other like two sides of a zipper . As a result neither of the messenger RNA molecules is available for producing the amoebapore protein.
Using this technique, the scientists have managed to block about 60% of amoebapore production in the amoeba. The engineer amoeba was much less aggressive than their original counterparts. In the follow up research they managed to completely block the gene that encodes the lethal protein in effect developing a new breed of “Silenced” amoebae incapable of making amoebapore .Now the scientists are experimenting an whether the silenced amoebae can be used as a vaccine against aggressive amoebae.
It successful, this will herald a possibility of the first vaccine of it’s kind.