Profiling the mycobacterial immune response in human lung tissue to inform novel TB vaccine design
Led by Assistant Professor Alba Llibre Serradell (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom), with Dr Cristina Vilaplana Massaguer (Fundació Institut Germans Trias i Pujol (IGTP), Spain)
Project Aim
Tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), is the number one infectious killer worldwide. In 2023, 10.8 million people fell ill with TB, and 1.25 million died. Vaccination is the best way of controlling any infectious diseases outbreak. Currently, there is only one TB vaccine (i.e. BCG) and it is more than a hundred years old. It is not particularly effective against TB that affects the lungs, the main affected organ and the one primarily responsible for disease transmission. Therefore, there is an urgent need for the development of new, effective vaccines against TB. One of the reasons why it is very difficult to design a good TB vaccine is because the models we use (mouse, rabbit, etc.) are similar but different to humans. There are obvious ethical concerns, and thus experimental limitations, that prevent the study of the immune response that humans mount when challenged with M.tb. However, at the University of Birmingham, we have set up a model that very closely resembles what happens in real life. Through the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, we have access to human lung tissue from patients that must undergo surgery. This means that we can model, in the laboratory, M.tb infection in the tissue that it is infected naturally (the human lung). In the same way that the mouse immune system is different to the human immune system, the BCG used for vaccination is different from the M.tb that people get infected with. They are both bacteria with many similarities, and some important differences. Our study wants to investigate how the cells in the human lung respond differently to BCG and M.tb. We think that understanding these differences will help us a lot in designing new, effective vaccines against TB and help with the worldwide burden caused by this ancient disease.
