French scientists have created the first tuberculosis vaccine in almost 100 years

French scientists have created and tested the first tuberculosis vaccine since 1921. In their opinion, this discovery will make it possible to take a serious step in the fight against invulnerable strains of the bacterium.

As RIA Novosti reports with reference to the scientific journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology , the new vaccine has already been tested on mice.

“We killed and disassembled microbes, isolating so-called biodroplets from them. These drops are a product of nature and they are easily decomposed in the body. We introduced these drops into the mouse's body and found that the immune system responded to them. Now we need to test how such mice react to infection with tuberculosis in order to create a full-fledged vaccine,” said Axel Gaiser, a biologist from the Hopkirk Research Institute in Palmerston (New Zealand).

In order to create these biodroplets, scientists had to resort to gene editing. Koch's bacillus is not able to synthesize such drops, so experts inserted the genes responsible for this function into the genome of a related microbe - Mycobacterium smegmatis. The first experiments showed that with the introduction of these drops, an immune reaction occurs in mice, including to the tuberculosis bacillus. In the near future, biologists will check how mice react to infection with tuberculosis. However, the long-term effect of this vaccination is still controversial in the scientific world.

According to the World Health Organization, tuberculosis is one of the 10 leading causes of death in the world. In 2015, 10.4 million people became ill with tuberculosis and 1.8 million people died from the disease. More than 95% of deaths from tuberculosis occur in low- and middle-income countries. Six countries account for 60% of the total cases, with India ranking first, followed by Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa. According to experts, in 2015, a million children fell ill with tuberculosis and 170 thousand of them died.

The main tool for the fight against tuberculosis today is the BCG vaccine, developed by the French in 1921. It is not always used and not everywhere; there are still pockets of tuberculosis on Earth, and in a number of regions of the world, Koch's bacillus has already become invulnerable to the effects of drugs. Therefore, the creation of a new vaccine against tuberculosis, capable of instilling immunity to new strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is one of the priorities in science today.

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