India chasing new Tuberculosis vaccines after 100 years

Chasing India’s target of eliminating tuberculosis by 2025, scientists at the Indian Council of Medical Research have recruited about 12,000 participants for a phase III study of two potential vaccines. The researchers want to see how effective the vaccines are in preventing the disease in adult household members of a person newly diagnosed with TB. The participants from across seven sites in India will be monitored for three years before the potential vaccines are approved for use commercially or under the national TB programme. “Recruitment in the middle of a pandemic was a huge challenge for us because we had to motivate healthy people in a household where TB was detected to come to the DOTS centres for vaccination,” one of the scientists said on condition of anonymity. DOTS, or directly observed treatment, is the name given to the TB control strategy recommended by the World Health Organization. One of the vaccines being...