Photo: Polina Tankilevitch | Pexels
A large-scale efficacy trial of a promising tuberculosis (TB) vaccine will soon launch with $550 million in pledged funding from two major philanthropies. The placebo-controlled trial, which will take 4-6 years to complete, will enroll 26,000 adults to test the M72 vaccine at 50 sites in Africa and Southeast Asia. It will primarily assess whether M72 can prevent people who have latent infections with Mycobacterium tuberculosis from developing pulmonary TB. The trial will also recruit 4000 uninfected participants to assess vaccine safety and test efficacy in the general population. In 2020, the Gates foundation was licensed by vaccine developer GSK to further develop M72 for poor countries hit hardest by TB. In 2021, TB sickened 10.6 million people and killed 1.6 million people. Seventeen other TB vaccines also are in development.
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