Manchester Student Meningococcal Infection

More on possible Gain-of-Function at the Manchester Meningococcal Reference Unit

Mar 22, 2026

Yesterday I wrote an essay about an outbreak of virulent meningococcal infection in Canterbury near the University of Kent in which I posed the question Gain-of-Function at the Manchester Meningococcal Reference Unit?

This morning I woke up to the news that a student at St John Rigby College in Wigan—twenty miles west of Manchester—is suspected of having a meningococcal infection.

I also noticed a paper published in January 2026 about a new meningococcal vaccine that is now being rolled out for British university students.

First use of Trumenba (MenB-fHbp) vaccine to control a nursery outbreak of serogroup B invasive meningococcal disease involving children previously immunised with Bexsero (4CMenB), England, November 2023

One of the paper’s authors, Roy Borrow, is head of the Manchester Meningococcal Reference Unit. As I noted yesterday, this lab works in “vaccine evaluation, antibiotic resistance monitoring, pre-clinical vaccine development, and virulence studies.”

Was Borrow’s lab performing challenge studies on this new vaccine using Neisseria meningitidis samples whose virulence had been amplified, perhaps by serial passage through rats? Alternatively, had the Manchester Reference Unit received samples whose virulence had been amplified by serial passage through rhesus monkeys at another lab? Note that serial passage can produce strains with faster replication, leading to higher bacterial loads in a host.

Yet another element of this story that should be investigated is why precisely the older 4CMenB (Bexsero) vaccine—designed to protect against invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) caused by Neisseria meningitidis serogroup B—did not provide universal coverage against all circulating strains?

Finally, were the circulating strains not covered by the older vaccine becoming the dominant strain in Britain do to selective pressure applied by the 4CMenB (Bexsero) vaccine?

This strikes me as a question for Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche. If any readers are in contact with the Belgian vaccinologist, please forward this post to him.