Researchers at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a new method to fight tuberculosis under which a vaccine candidate for disease can be delivered making use of outer membrane vesicles (OMVs).
The spherical vesicles, which can be delivered to immune cells, are secreted by bacteria coated on gold nanoparticles. This delivery is expected to potentially trigger an immune response to offer protection against TB.
TB is caused across the world by bacteria called Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which is claiming the lives of a million people every year. At present, BCG is the only effective vaccine against TB and it has a weakened form of the disease causing bacterium and when injected into the blood-stream, it produces to fight the disease.
Scientists say that the BCG vaccine doesn’t protect adolescents and adults effectively as it does children. This prompted Rachit Agarwal, Assistant Professor at the centre for Biosystems Science and Engineering (BSSE), IISc, and his group to work on developing a potential subunit vaccine candidate which contains only parts of the infectious bacterium to stimulate an immune response.
Though some other scientists had designed subunit vaccine earlier, they had not been effective in the treatment. Agarwal’s group took a slightly different approach making use of OMVs, which would induce an immune response against the pathogen.
Such efforts could open up new avenues for the development of vaccines for other bacterial diseases as well.
