BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

Avoiding TB's subversion

August 7, 2008 7:00 AM UTC

Mycobacterium tuberculosis has proven a tough bug to tame, with no effective vaccines on the market to stop the bacterium's spread. Now, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes how M. tuberculosis evades peptide antigen presentation by dendritic cells (DCs), normally the first step in fighting an infectious agent.1

The researchers make a case for tuberculosis vaccines or adjuvants consisting of M. tuberculosis (Mtb) lipid antigens to enhance immunogenicity. As a next step, the team leader thinks efficacy experiments in non-human primates are needed to assess the overall relevance for human vaccination...