Briefly blocking a key molecule when administering the only approved vaccine for tuberculosis vastly improves long-term protection against the devastating disease in mice, researchers report.

Tuberculosis (TB) infects more than 10 million people a year, killing more than 1 million a year. The Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine is widely used to inoculate children against TB, but its effectiveness wanes over time. Researchers around the world are hunting for more effective vaccines and treatments.

«We are very excited that we can reverse BCG’s waning effectiveness by combining it with a host-directed therapy into one dose, which makes it very practical for the clinic,» says Joanne Turner, PhD, Texas Biomed’s Executive Vice President, Research, and senior paper author.

Decades of research

Turner emphasized the finding builds on more than 20 years of research. Throughout her career, she has been investigating the role of a molecule, interleukin-10 (IL-10) on TB. IL-10 typically helps dampen excessive inflammation during infection, but through numerous studies, Turner and her colleagues have found IL-10 does more harm than good in TB, definitively showing it drives TB infection.

In previous studies, Turner and her colleagues blocked IL-10 at different times during infection — late into infection, the first three weeks during infection — and have knocked out IL-10 completely. All signs pointed to improved TB control and longer survival. In the current study, the team looked at what happens if they temporarily block IL-10 before infection occurs, at the same time as giving the BCG vaccine.

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Materials provided by Texas Biomedical Research Institute. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.