Horizon 2020 to fund TB vaccine development
Horizon 2020 will fund a project to develop a future vaccine against tuberculosis.
Experts from the Institute of Biomedical Research of Vigo, Spain, will be responsible for the search for biomarkers which correlate with protective immune responses against the pathogen that causes the disease.
The Infectious Diseases strategic area of the Biomedical Capacities Support Program (BIOCAPS) is in this way contributing to address an important public health problem that affects countries around the world. This illness affects close to nine million individuals each year, of which almost 1.5 million ultimately die of the disease despite the medical advances that have been made, converting tuberculosis into the second cause of death due to an infectious disease worldwide, behind the HIV virus.
Inadequate diagnosis and the ability of the pathogen that causes the disease to adapt to antibiotics, becoming resistant to the drugs used, highlight the urgent need to address this problem in a preventative manner, which is by developing a truly effective vaccine.
This project aims to design a new vaccine that will be based on the capacity to strengthen the immune system in a manner that will impede the passage of the pathogens across the respiratory mucosa, that is, at their point of entry.
“The only vaccine currently available is that which uses mycobacteria bovis, yet it is not fully effective against pulmonary tuberculosis and it only combats the severe infant forms of the disease,” explained África González-Fernández, co-ordinator of BIOCAPS.
The project will last for four years and receive nearly €8m of funding from Horizon 2020. Co-ordinated by St George’s Hospital at the University of London, other groups from the UK, Spain (as well as the group at BIOCAPS, a group at the CSIC’s Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas in Vigo and another group in Catalonia), Sweden, Italy, Czech Republic and Mozambique will collaborate on the project.
