8 October 2008
Source: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council: www.bbsrc.ac.uk

Researchers at Aberystwyth University have licensed ground-breaking research to a non-profit product development partnership working to develop new, more effective vaccines against Tuberculosis (TB).  This development will give hope that significantly better prevention and treatment of TB will be available within the next few years.

The Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation, which was founded to develop new, cost-effective TB vaccines for use in the developing world, has licensed a discovery of a protein that is able to 'wake up' dormant Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria that cause TB. The research and the fundamental knowledge that came out of it could be used to develop a vaccine that either stops infecting TB bacteria from taking hold or, for the one in every three people world-wide who are already carrying a latent TB infection, prevents dormant bacteria from 'waking up'. Another possible strategy could be to deliberately 'wake up' dormant bacteria in a controlled way so they can be destroyed with antibiotics.

In the late 1990s, researchers funded by BBSRC discovered a new family of proteins that were able to resuscitate bacteria found harmlessly in and around the human body. When 'awoken' from dormancy the bacteria were then much more susceptible to attack from antibiotics. The team led by Professors Mike Young and Doug Kell at Aberystwyth University together with Prof Arseny Kaprelyants of the Bakh Institute of Biochemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, identified the gene in the bacterium that produced the protein and went on to discover the corresponding genes in M. tuberculosis. This research has now been licensed by Aeras after years of development. Aeras plans to take its recombinant BCG  (AERAS-407) vaccine, based in part on the Aberystwyth work, to clinical trial in 2009.

Further information

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation

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