River Chad

Treating adult acne can feel like one big science experiment—until now. This is the guy’s guide to adult acne. Read the rest of the stories here .

W HAT IF ACNE wasn’t so damn frustrating to treat or just…didn’t exist at all? George Liu, MD, PhD, and a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are developing a vaccine designed to target certain types of bacteria to help prevent acne from forming in the first place.

Dr. Liu’s team researches how bacterial pathogens cause diseases. While doing so, they discovered that C. acnes —a bacteria that naturally lives on the skin and whose imbalance is a known acne trigger—secretes two forms of an enzyme called hyaluronidase: Hyl-A and Hyl-B. Hyl-A plays a central role in the development of acne by causing inflammation, whereas Hyl-B is an anti-inflammatory that can be beneficial for skin by reducing inflammation and helping prevent an aggressive immune response.

Existing acne treatments are broad and often focus on killing all C.…