Designing self-destructing bacteria make effective tuberculosis vaccines: Study
1 month ago

Designing self-destructing bacteria make effective tuberculosis vaccines: Study

Hindustan Times  

Working towards more effective tuberculosis vaccinations, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have developed two strains of mycobacteria with "kill switches" that may be activated to stop the bacteria after they elicit an immune response. "BCG protects children from tuberculosis meningitis, but it doesn't effectively protect adults from pulmonary tuberculosis, which is why it's only used in high-incidence countries," said Dr. Dirk Schnappinger, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior author on both of the new studies. "We needed a version of BCG that triggers an immune response, but then you can flip a switch to eliminate the bacteria," said Dr. Schnappinger. Chan School of Public Health, the team's second paper is an effort to make clinical trials feasible--developing extremely safe strains of TB bacteria that can be used in controlled human infection studies.

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History of this topic

TB: gene editing could add new power to a 100-year-old vaccine
7 months, 2 weeks ago

TB: gene editing could add new power to a 100-year-old vaccine

The Hindu  

Tuberculosis dates back more than 9,000 years. Antibodies remain in the blood, and some white blood cells may also become memory cells for specific bacteria in case they invade the body again. It is also proficient at evading the human immune system, which is why there is only one vaccine that has been developed against the disease in 100 years. …

Tuberculosis tricks body's immune system to make people infectious, claims study
8 years, 5 months ago

Tuberculosis tricks body's immune system to make people infectious, claims study

India TV News  

Tuberculosis tricks the immune system into attacking the body's lung tissue so the bacteria are allowed to spread to other people, a new study says. The researchers believe that current ideas about how tuberculosis develops in patients may be incomplete and that, in fact, infection causes autoimmunity, where the immune system reacts incorrectly to its own tissue. "It seems that …

New vaccines for old foe
12 years, 4 months ago

New vaccines for old foe

The Hindu  

Tuberculosis and the microbe that causes it, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, have dogged humanity down the millennia. This ancient plague continues to blight human lives, leading to almost nine million new cases and causing 1.4 million deaths globally each year. In recent times, there have been determined efforts to develop new and more effective vaccines that could curb this disease and thereby …

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