NIH awards three contracts for tuberculosis vaccine research

Under a $30 million contract with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), three institutions have been selected to create new centers of immunology research to advance tuberculosis (TB) vaccine development.

The three recipients include the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, the Infectious Disease Research Institute of Seattle, and the Seattle Children’s Hospital. All three will be given up to seven years of support for three Immune Mechanisms of Protection Against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) Centers, to analyze immune responses to better protect against infections. That knowledge, NIAID said, will help guide the design and creation of new and better TB vaccines.

While existing vaccines grant some protection io infants and young children against cases where TB has spread to multiple organs, they do not prevent lung infections or long-term protection against Mtb infections. NIH notes that, in the past 200 years, TB has killed more than 1 billion people, leaving it the leading infectious cause of death globally. Beyond that, nearly one-quarter of the world’s population has latent Mtb infections already contained within them, though these do not make them ill and are not transmittable. It does, however, mean they have a 5 to 10 percent lifetime risk of developing active TB.

This program seeks to foster a greater understanding of the immune responses required to prevent initial infection, the development of latent infections as well as the transition into active TB. As such, the research centers will analyze immune responses against Mtb, as well as immune responses elicited by vaccine candidates in animal models and humans.