Queensland researchers are hoping to develop a world-first gonorrhoea vaccine with the antibiotic resistant bacteria affecting more than 100 million people every year.
Left untreated, the sexually transmitted infection can lead to infertility in women and blindness in newborns.
"Even though people don't like talking about sexually transmitted infections, gonorrhoea can cause significant long-term impacts on reproductive health," Professor Kate Seib from Griffith University Institute for Glycomics said.
The disease disproportionately affects women with up to 80 per cent asymptomatic.
"Unless you have active screening you may not know you have it, which means you may be transmitting it, but also it's still causing damage to your reproductive tract," Prof Seib said.
"You could become infertile never having known you're even infected."
Prof Seib has been working on the bacteria for more than a decade, and is hopeful a new partnership with Swiss company LimmaTech Biologics will mean clinical trials for a vaccine in the next year.
A world-first vaccine could be three to five years away.
Without it, addressing gonorrhoea involves treatment with antibiotics or prevention with condom use or abstinence.
"This bacteria is one of the best...at being able to change itself so it can avoid killing by antibiotics," Prof Seib said.
"Heaps of different antibiotics have been used since the 1940s and the bacteria has become resistant to all of them.
"Now we're on our last option, and there's been cases where strains have been identified that are resistant to these antibiotics as well."
LimmaTech is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company that develops vaccines for the prevention of life-threatening diseases.
The research is part of the company's proprietary pipeline focused on the increasing threat of antimicrobial resistance.
"We have discovered gonococcal vaccine antigens that show great promise and the development program will harness LimmaTech platform technology to develop the vaccine product," Griffith Professor Mike Jennings said.
Gonorrhoea is the second most common sexually transmitted infection globally with more than 105 million people infected each year.
Infection also increases the risk of contracting and transmitting HIV.
Griffith has signed the exclusive licence and co-development agreement to develop and commercialise the vaccine candidate globally.
The deal includes investment in research and development along with licence and milestone fees, and royalties on product sales.
