Could gene editing add power to a 100-year-old TB vaccine?
The Hindu
Breakthrough in tuberculosis vaccine development through gene-editing BCG, offering new hope in the fight against infectious diseases.
Tuberculosis dates back more than 9,000 years. It is the most infectious bacterial disease and in 2022, 10.6 million people fell ill with it. Of these, 23 per cent occurred in Africa.
The only vaccine against tuberculosis, the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, is more than 100 years old and is primarily effective for infants and young children.
Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Pathology have made a significant breakthrough in vaccine development by gene-editing the BCG to make it more effective.
Microbiologist Bavesh Kana, one of the lead researchers, explains to Nadine Dreyer from The Conversation Africa, the science behind this breakthrough and the potential it holds for other vaccines.
Vaccines primarily work by mimicking dangerous infectious agents. You want your immune system to recognise the vaccine as an “invader” and then mount an immune response to it. But you don’t want the invasive agent to make you sick.
To understand how vaccines work, it helps to look at how the immune system works, because vaccines harness the natural activity of your immune system.
The immune system: There are about 100 trillion bacteria and viruses in the gastrointestinal tract. The proteins and sugars on the surface of bacteria, viruses or other disease-causing pathogens have different shapes to any of the ones in the human body. These markers are pathogen-associated molecular patterns, commonly known as PAMPs. Think of the spikes on coronavirus.