|
A clinical trial in the November issue of Nature Medicine shows that a new vaccine against tuberculosis can induce a long-lasting boost of immune responses in people who previously received the widely used vaccine bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG).
In a trial of a candidate vaccine against tuberculosis, Helen McShane and her colleagues found that a modified vaccinia virus expressing antigen 85A of Mycobacterium tuberculosis induced immune responses in volunteers that had never been vaccinated. And people who received BCG 0.5-38 years before the new vaccine had substantially stronger responses than subjects that solely received BCG. Boosting vaccinations with the modified vaccinia virus could offer a practical and efficient strategy for enhancing antituberculosis immunity in areas in which the disease is endemic. Author contact Helen McShane (University of Oxford, UK)
Tel: + 44 1865 857 417, E-mail: helen.mcshane@ndm.ox.ac.uk Also available online. (C) Nature Medicine press release.
Message posted by: Trevor M. D'Souza
|