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Safer, More Effective TB Vaccine for HIV-positive People Developed
The vaccine, which has been especially designed for HIV-positive people, may help curtail the global spread of the disease, as tuberculosis has been known as a biggest cause of death in people with HIV.
"The AIDS and tuberculosis epidemics are now so intertwined in many parts of the world that we can't win the fight against one of these diseases without also taking on the other," said Dr. Marcus Horwitz, principal investigator and professor of medicine and microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The current vaccine against tuberculosis, called BCG, can cause serious and even fatal disease in HIV-positive people later in life, if HIV weakens the immune system, allowing the vaccine to multiply unchecked and spread throughout the body.
Aiming to solve this problem, the researchers used an innovative method to limit the number of times the new vaccine can replicate in the body, just enough to stimulate the immune system to produce T cells to fight future infection with the tuberculosis bacillus, but not enough to overwhelm the immune system if it subsequently becomes weakened by HIV.
The researchers showed that the new vaccine better protects guinea pigs from tuberculosis than the current vaccine. They also showed that the new vaccine is much safer than BCG in a severely immunocompromised animal host - mice with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID mice) that completely lack an immune system.
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