Why is there no vaccine for Mycoplasma pneumoniae? How long will it take to develop?

Since October, "mycoplasma pneumonia" has been raging. In China‘s children‘s mycoplasma pneumonia diagnosis and treatment guidelines, due to the lack of mycoplasma cell wall, penicillin, cephalosporin antibiotics on mycoplasma pneumonia treatment is ineffective, such as roxithromycin, azithromycin and other macrocyclic lactone antibacterial drugs is the first choice of treatment for mycoplasma pneumonia.

However, because macrolide antibiotics are bacteriostatic, is by inhibiting the synthesis of bacterial proteins and play a bacteriostatic effect, in the patient‘s body is mainly to inhibit the activity of mycoplasma, and then by the body to heal itself. And because in recent years, azithromycin and other traditional drug resistance situation increases year by year (from 3.2% in 2008 to 30.5% in 2018), is also the cause of a large number of children with "mycoplasma infections" is more and more difficult to treat the reason that the drug inhibitory effect is not as good as a year, and even the media said that nowadays the "Mycoplasma mycoplasma year" in nearly half of the children taking azithromycin has no effect.

However, the urgent clinical needs, seemingly huge market, not only the country, even the world seems to have no "mycoplasma pneumonia" pipeline exposure.

There are several main reasons for the difficulty in developing a vaccine for mycoplasma pneumonia: 

First, the many different subtypes and serotypes of Mycoplasma make it difficult to develop a vaccine;

Second, the immune response is complex, involving a number of cellular and humoral immune links, the development of a vaccine to deal with the full range of immune responses is still a lot of difficulties to overcome;

Third, the symptoms of mycoplasma infection are mostly self-limiting, resulting in a lack of demand for mycoplasma vaccines, which directly reduces the incentive for related research and development and promotion.

However, even with all the research and market limitations, the enthusiasm for mycoplasma vaccines in the field of basic research remains unabated, and a number of studies have received focused attention from scientists. Currently, MP vaccine R&D focuses on several key vaccine areas, such as subunit vaccines, epitope peptide vaccines, DNA vaccines, and live-carrier vaccines.