A microscopic image of the bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG, Japan strain). A BCG vaccine has long been in use against TB, but it is useless in adults or against the most common pulmonary TB. Scientists are now working on new vaccines that are hoped to be much more successful.
Credit: Wikimedia
LONDON: A new vaccine for tuberculosis – second biggest killer globally after HIV/AIDS – will be available by 2020, that could cut infections by 90% experts said.
Tuberculosis infects almost 10 million and kills almost two million people each year, and is increasingly untreatable due to antibiotic resistant strains that are especially dangerous to HIV positive people – 500,000 million of HIV positive people die each year due to TB infections.
Although a BCG vaccine has long been in use against TB, it only prevents so called ‘disseminated TB’ in small children up to age of five and is useless in adults or against the most common pulmonary TB.
Huge impact possible
Chris Dye, director of Health Information in the Office of HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria & Neglected Tropical Diseases at the WHO, Switzerland, said: "If we had a vaccine of moderate good efficacy it's pretty clear from the kind of calculations that I normally do that we could have a huge impact on tuberculosis pretty quickly."
Since the TB community met at the First Global Forum for TB Vaccines in the late 1990s, 13 new candidate vaccines have entered clinical trials in humans and over 40 are in the pipeline.
One of these is expected to enter phase 3 efficacy trials by 2013 and if successful it may be rolled out as early as 2016, scientists have said at the Second Global Forum on TB Vaccines in Tallinn, Estonia, 21-24 September.
TB experts think out of the box
"There has been a tremendous progress done in only last 15 years," said Christine Sizemore, senior director of vaccine assessment and quality control at the National Institutes of Health, in the USA.
The conference concluded with recommendations for the ‘Blueprint to TB Vaccines’ – a document that will guide the field over the next decade, in which a first new vaccine is expected.
"The conference was a success," Brennan said. "While there were no big surprises, it brought a diverse group of people working on TB together and this has sparked some innovative, out-of the-box thinking, and challenged some long-held dogmas".
