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Development of candidate vaccines against tuberculosis

Dr. Tyagi’s group elegantly used an indigenously developed systems for the expression of several antigens of M. tuberculosis in BCG for the purpose of developing candidate recombinant BCG vaccines as well as candidate DNA vaccines against tuberculosis.  Detailed evaluation of these candidate vaccines against aerosol infection of M. tuberculosis in guinea pigs has been carried out by using heterologous prime boost approach.  After 15 years of continuous efforts, three regimens comprising of (i) recombinant BCG overexpressing 85C, (ii) recombinant BCG overexpressing a-crystallin as the priming agent followed by boosting with a DNA vaccine expressing the same antigen and (iii) BCG as priming agent followed by boosting with DNA vaccine expressing a–crystallin, which have shown a superior and sustained protection in comparison to the present BCG vaccine both on the basis of reduction in the bacillary load in lung and spleen as well as histopathological damage have been in principle recommended for human clinical trials by the Tuberculosis Vaccine Clinical Trial Expert Group (TVCTEG) of the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.  Currently, upstream pre-clinical work on these candidate vaccines is in progress so that eventually the human clinical trials can be initiated.
Last Updated Tuesday, 11 March 2014 12:00

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