Progress and Challenges in Antimicrobial Resistance and Bacterial Vaccines

In recent decades, pathogens have continued to strike humans in the form of newly emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases, opportunistic infectious diseases, and infections caused by drug-resistant microbes. In response, humans have developed modern platform technologies that can produce effective vaccines to prevent pathogens from causing infectious diseases. Vaccines against antimicrobial-resistant organisms could prevent or minimize life-threatening infections, thus lowering healthcare costs. These pharmaceutical products could also reduce antibiotic use, lowering the risk of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) emergence. Furthermore, once a population has received enough vaccines, indirect protection via herd immunity can help to prevent the spread of resistant strains. In this sense, antibiotics would be unnecessary once the burden of pathogen-associated illnesses is reduced. Based on such a notion, bacterial vaccines would be an excellent and applicable solution to fight AMR. In this review, we highlight our current understanding of AMR, the role of bacterial vaccines in preventing AMR, and discuss the potential of bacterial vaccines and their pitfalls in managing infectious diseases.