Rino Rappuoli of the pharmaceutical company Novartis and colleagues set out to make a substance - an immunogen that would prompt the body to produce antibodies to fight all the numerous subvarieties of group B.

Rappuoli and his team developed 54 candidate immunogen immunogens and tried them on laboratory mice to see which were most effective. Most of them didn't work very well.

" But we found two or three molecules, one of which was very good, which was able to induce immunity against all the variants of the molecule. "

Rappuoli's work sets the stage for development of a vaccine against group B meningitis, and the researcher says coming up with a genetically-engineered, custom antigen may lead to the development of vaccines against other diseases that have challenged vaccine makers so far.

" I believe that this approach will be used more and more in the future , and will help to solve some of those very difficult problems. "

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