Experts advise on how TB vaccination candidates can be compared

10 Jul 2008

Paul Chinnock

Source: PLoS Medicine (see original article or PDF)

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The vaccine commonly used all over the world to protect against tuberculosis (TB) is known as BCG – the Bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccine. At best, it is 80% effective for a period of around 15 years. However, in many developing countries its effectiveness is very much less than this.

For many years, insufficient efforts were made to develop a new vaccine, to either replace or be used in combination with BCG. Now, however, many potential new TB vaccines are under development. Obviously it is important to be able to compare their effectiveness but several different methods have been used by researchers to assess their vaccines, making it hard to see which is best.

To address this problem, the World Health Organization (WHO) Initiative for Vaccine Research sponsored three meetings of experts to discuss assay harmonization for new tuberculosis vaccine trials. The expert group has now produced its recommendations, which have been published in PLoS Medicine

In their report the authors stress that there should be a single and simple harmonised assay for all TB vaccine trials.

The full recommendations may be seen here.