Boosting the TB vaccine
By Nathan Seppa
The best available vaccine against tuberculosis isn’t foolproof. The so-called bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine is a live but disabled form of the tuberculosis bacterium itself, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Unfortunately, the vaccine doesn’t carry enough bacterial proteins to prime the immune systems of all recipients for challenges by the real pathogen. The BCG vaccine leaves a fourth of vaccinated children unprotected and protects even fewer adults.
Stewart T. Cole of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues report restoring to the vaccine several M. tuberculosis genes that have been absent. The product elicits a more potent immune response in mice and guinea pigs than does the standard BCG, the researchers report in the May Nature Medicine.