Breakthrough for TB vaccine

There has been a breakthrough in attempts to increase the effectiveness of the only tuberculosis (TB) vaccine approved for humans.

This has been at the University of Texas Health Science Centre at Houston, with the Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine.

Although it only provides partial protection for children and no help for adults, TB is still a major worldwide problem, but scientists believe that the disease could be stabilised if further improvements to the vaccine are achieved.

Chinnaswamy Jagannath, lead author of the study, stated in Nature Medicine: "An improved vaccine is widely seen as the best potential method of controlling the disease and is an urgent public health priority."

The researchers wrote in the paper: "Our findings break new ground in vaccine research in general and make improvements for antituberculosis vaccines in particular, because they provide a simple and powerful strategy to enhance vaccine efficiency."

BCG works by stimulating production of immune cells that can fight TB infection when it is injected into sufferers.

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