New type of tuberculosis vaccine developed

Health[1] Health[1]Biotechnology [2]Diseases [3]Health [4]Medicine [5]The Body [6]Denmark [7]Videnskab.dk [8] Danish scientists have developed a new vaccine against tuberculosis. The vaccine was created in an entirely new way and may potentially save millions of lives, say the researchers. Tuberculosis annually kills some 1.4 million people, making it one of the world’s deadliest diseases. This may be about to change now, as Danish researchers have developed a vaccine which they say hits the bacteria “where it hurts the most”. The vaccine has so far only been tested on mice, where it has shown early promise: “We have developed a vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognise essential proteins in the tuberculosis bacterium. The vaccine makes it much more difficult for the bacterium to escape the body’s natural defences,” says Niels Peter H. Knudsen, of the Department of Infectious Disease Immunology at the Danish State Serum Institute, who is the lead author of the new study [9]. ”The tuberculosis bacterium is incredibly well adapted to infecting and living inside humans without our immune system being able to do anything about it. That’s also what makes it so difficult to vaccinate against. But we hope that our vaccine can be the solution which will ultimately save millions of lives.”