Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of the sanofi-aventis Group, announced that it has entered into an exclusive, world-wide licensing agreement with Syntiron to develop and commercialize its prophylactic vaccine against Staphylococcus, including Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA. MRSA are responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans, sometimes referred to as multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus because these bacteria are resistant to a large group of antibiotics, including penicillins.

Syntiron is a private biotech company located in St. Paul, Minnesota; its mission is the prevention and treatment of human disease resulting from bacterial infection. Under the terms of the agreement, Sanofi Pasteur will support the joint, pre-clinical development of the product, working cooperatively with Syntiron, and be responsible for all future developments, regulatory approval, and commercialization of the vaccine. The agreement includes an undisclosed initial licensing fee, milestone payments, and royalty payments on future sales of the product.

“This agreement with Syntiron is just another example of Sanofi Pasteur’s interest in partnering with biotechs to produce innovative vaccines to address public health needs,” said Wayne Pisano, president and chief executive office of Sanofi Pasteur. “Along with our development of a vaccine to prevent Clostridium difficile infection, the successful development of a vaccine to prevent MRSA would be a major achievement in combating hospital-associated infections.”

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a type of bacterium that is resistant to certain antibiotics. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s website, these antibiotics include methicillin and other more common antibiotics such as oxacillin, penicillin and amoxicillin. Staph infections, including MRSA, occur most frequently among persons in hospitals and healthcare facilities (such as nursing homes and dialysis centres) who have weakened immune systems.

MRSA infections that occur in otherwise healthy people who have not been recently (within the past year) hospitalized or had a medical procedure (such as dialysis, surgery, catheters) are known as community-associated (CA)-MRSA infections. These infections are usually skin infections, such as abscesses, boils, and other pus-filled lesions.

According to the Internet Journal of Infectious Diseases, MRSA has become one of the most important pathogens that cause post-operative infections, and, in the U.S., it accounts for up to 40 percent of nosocomial (hospital-associated) Staphylococcus aureus infections in large hospitals and 25-30 percent in smaller hospitals. In Europe, MRSA prevalence ranges from over 50 percent in Portugal and Italy to below 2 percent in Switzerland and the Netherlands. In Asia, the prevalence lies around 50 percent, with extremely high rates in Hong Kong (75 percent) and Japan (72 percent). In many African hospitals the prevalence of MRSA is estimated at 15 percent, with Kenya and Nigeria having the highest prevalence of 21-30 percent. And according to Johns Hopkins Medicine, MRSA is now endemic in many hospitals, being one of the leading causes of nosocomial pneumonia and surgical site infection and the second leading cause of nosocomial blood stream infections.

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