A multinational pharmaceutical company has developed a new vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), which would be soon tested on the human beings.
GlaxoSmithKline has announced here on Wednesday that clinical study to evaluate the safety and immuno-genicity of a prophylactic vaccine designed to induce protection against tuberculosis has been allowed by the Federal Drug Authority (FDA), United States of America (USA).
GSK (BIO) and Corixa Corporation, a developer of immuno-therapeutics, will be initiating the trial that will be conducted in the United States. This will be the first study of new TB vaccine to be conducted on human volunteers.
The company said that the recombinant tuberculosis antigen was a fusion protein of antigenic domains taken from different mycobacterium tuberculosis gene products that were recognised by the immune system cells harvested from patients that had been infected with tuberculosis, but who never showed/developed signs of the disease.
Highlighting the clinical aspects of the vaccine, Jean Stephenne, president, GlaxoSmithKline (Biologicals), said that the fusion protein combination appeared to have demonstrated protection against tuberculosis infection in a number of relevant animal species, including mice and monkeys.
"Tuberculosis is a significant global public health problem."
"We believe that a vaccine holds great promise for protection of patients around the world against TB and we look forward to the initiation of the clinical programme for this vaccine," he added.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis or MTB infection causes more deaths than any other infectious disease in the world. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), approximately 8 million people world-wide were infected with tuberculosis every year and an estimated 2 million die annually from the disease.