By Mark Moran - Producer-Editor, Contact - News
Big Sky Connection - The National Institutes of Health have awarded the University of Montana's Center for Translational Medicine $12.3 million as researchers pursue a vaccine for tuberculosis. While there are still thousands of cases a year in the United States, TB is widespread and often lethal in underserved parts of the world. Comments from Jay Evans, Ph.D., director of the Center for Translational Medicine at the University of Montana and chief scientific officer at Inimmune Corp. (Inimmune listed for financial disclosure).
Mark Moran
December 15, 2023 - Researchers at the University of Montana have been awarded more than more than $12 million from the National Institutes of Health to continue their work on a tuberculosis vaccine.
It is the latest step toward developing inoculation, which is especially important in the world's underdeveloped countries. The grant to the University of Montana's Center for Translational Medicine will be used to advance a promising vaccine candidate from the pretrial stage to clinical trials; the last stage before it is approved for clinical use.
Jay Evans, director of the Center for Translational Medicine at the University of Montana and chief scientific officer at Inimmune, said tuberculosis remains a potent killer in many parts of the world.
"TB, now behind COVID, was the world's leading infectious disease killer worldwide," Evans reported. "And the only one that surpassed that was COVID and that was just for the last few years of the pandemic that we all just experienced."
All told, the National Institutes of Health has awarded more than $25 million to university and private researchers to develop a commercial tuberculosis vaccine, which -- due to testing and clinical trials to ensure safety and effectiveness -- could still be a decade away.
Evans acknowledged ready access to antibiotics has made tuberculosis less of a problem in the United States, but in underdeveloped parts of the world, it remains hard to manage, highly contagious and often lethal.
"In areas where TB is endemic and antibiotics aren't as broadly used and available for it, it's a huge problem," Evans explained. "A lot of the people walking around are carriers of TB, and when that progresses to pulmonary disease, oftentimes it's deadly, especially for those people who don't have access to antibiotics."
Evans added a vaccine will help get ahead of the antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis currently circulating. He and his fellow scientists have been pursuing a vaccine for 20 years.
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