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Review
. 2021 Oct 25:12:740117.
doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2021.740117. eCollection 2021.

Advancing Adjuvants for Mycobacterium tuberculosis Therapeutics

Ana B Enriquez  1   2 , Angelo Izzo  3 , Shannon M Miller  4   5 , Erica L Stewart  6   7 , Robert N Mahon  8 , Daniel J Frank  9 , Jay T Evans  4   5 , Jyothi Rengarajan  1   2   10 , James A Triccas  6   7
Affiliations
Review

Advancing Adjuvants for Mycobacterium tuberculosis Therapeutics

Ana B Enriquez et al. Front Immunol. .

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide due to a single infectious disease agent. BCG, the only licensed vaccine against TB, offers limited protection against pulmonary disease in children and adults. TB vaccine research has recently been reinvigorated by new data suggesting alternative administration of BCG induces protection and a subunit/adjuvant vaccine that provides close to 50% protection. These results demonstrate the need for generating adjuvants in order to develop the next generation of TB vaccines. However, development of TB-targeted adjuvants is lacking. To help meet this need, NIAID convened a workshop in 2020 titled "Advancing Vaccine Adjuvants for Mycobacterium tuberculosis Therapeutics". In this review, we present the four areas identified in the workshop as necessary for advancing TB adjuvants: 1) correlates of protective immunity, 2) targeting specific immune cells, 3) immune evasion mechanisms, and 4) animal models. We will discuss each of these four areas in detail and summarize what is known and what we can advance on in order to help develop more efficacious TB vaccines.

Keywords: BCG; CD4+ T cells; M72; TLR; Th17; adjuvants; tuberculosis; vaccines.

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Conflict of interest statement

Author RNM was employed by company Columbus Technologies & Services Inc. JE and SM are employees of and own shares in Inimmune Corporation. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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