Tuberculosis kills 1.6 million people a year — second only to COVID in infectious disease deaths. Using immune cells and mRNA tech, scientists in South Africa are now one step closer to a new TB vaccine.
Munyaradzi Musvosvi, a researcher who works for the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative, in a storage facility at the University of Cape Town that holds in deep freeze the blood samples of people exposed to TB. He's part of a team working to develop a potential mRNA vaccine by looking at the immune cells in the blood samples.
This meant that when the researchers analyzed the first round of blood samples they could identify a subset who had immune cells indicating that they had been exposed to TB but had not gotten sick. Then, says Musvosvi,"as we follow them up, we could document that some of these adolescents were [subsequently] diagnosed with active TB disease. They had symptoms and we could actually measure the bacteria in the sputum that they were coughing up.
Except there was a snag. Scientists didn't actually have a good way of doing that kind of analysis of T-cells. At least not one that wasn't prohibitively expensive. But Huang says he didn't appreciate just how useful the technique – and several related ones developed with collaborators – might prove until the researchers in South Africa found out about the work and proposed teaming up.So they thawed them out and got to work.Just as they'd hoped, they discovered several T-cells that were far more common to people who are able to control TB. And they've been able to determine several TB proteins TB that these T-cells focus on.
,"and what we're trying to do here is to identify priority targets that vaccine developers could then use to develop a TB vaccine that is more efficacious."But it's particularly handy in light of the final twist to this tale: The recent development of a whole new class of vaccines — the highly effective"mRNA" shots against COVID made by Pfizer and Moderna.
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