The adverse impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on TB services has brought the urgency of vaccine development efforts into sharp focus. (Express Photo)

There is an air of expectancy and anticipation in the TB community that the amazing speed of vaccine development for Covid-19 will be translated into the development of a new TB vaccine, which would replace the century-old BCG vaccine, noted pulmonologist and researcher Dr Zarir Udwadia told The Indian Express.

Experts like Dr Udwadia and others welcomed WHO’s plans on setting up a TB vaccine accelerator council that will facilitate the use of effective novel TB vaccines.

The adverse impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on TB services has brought the urgency of vaccine development efforts into sharp focus.

At a high-level panel on TB at the World Economic Forum, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, announced plans to establish a new TB Vaccine Accelerator Council.

Dr Rajesh Karyakarte, Maharashtra coordinator of genome sequencing for Covid-19 and in charge of Centre for Excellence Laboratory for Genomics at B J Medical College and Sassoon General Hospital in Pune, told The Indian Express that the BCG vaccine has a documented protective effect against meningitis and disseminated TB in children.

“However, neither does it prevent primary infection nor the reactivation of latent pulmonary infection. Thus, the principal source of infection in the community cannot be taken care of. One of the aims of WHO’s plan is early life immunization with BCG replacement, Hence, a new vaccine is the need of the hour.

Here, the investigational TB vaccine candidate (M72/AS01E) shows promising results that are unprecedented in decades of TB vaccine research. This is a ray of hope in our efforts to end TB,” Dr Karyakarte said. Leena Menghaney, India head and Global IP Advisor, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)-Access campaign, said, “We welcome this step by World Health Organisation to accelerate TB vaccine development. However the pandemic has highlighted the important role of political leadership particularly by countries who are most affected. It requires sharing of research data and technology by all stakeholders including pharma corporations and public laboratories. Most importantly, a multi-country clinical trial platform in high burden countries will have to be developed,” Menghaney said.

‘Exciting times for doctors’

“These are exciting times for doctors treating Drug Resistant TB (DR-TB) and for their patients suffering from this deadly disease. For far too long our patients have been subjected to long, expensive, toxic and painful injection-based regimens. These regimens had been adopted despite sub-optimal evidence and without any random controlled trials to support their use. Little wonder then that global treatment success rates were only 60 per cent for MDR-TB in 2019,” Dr Zarir Udwadia said.

Dr Udwadia and Dr Jigneshkumar M Patel from Respiratory Medicine, PD Hinduja Hospital and Research Center, Mumbai, in their editorial ‘New treatments for Drug Resistant TB: Past imperfect, future bright’ published recently in Lung India journal, has said the emergence of new drugs and new all-oral regimens for DR-TB signals an exciting renaissance in the management of this disease.

Courtesy: Indian Express