Tuberculosis is the world s most deadly infectious disease. But lofty global plans to stamp out this global killer by 2030 were dramatically slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic
The $5bn (about R92bn) needed every year for the next four years for TB vaccine research is the only way to give future generations a shot at ending the disease, experts at the World Conference on Lung Health in Paris said on Thursday.
In late June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust announced that they will, together, contribute more than R10bn for the next phase of a clinical trial to test how well a new vaccine, called M72/AS01E, works to stop people from getting sick with TB.
Researchers say now that the identities of the bacterial protein targets are known, the next step will be to design candidate mRNA-based vaccines of these proteins.