New Delhi, January 31, 2010 - IR Summary/TOI -  

The life danger for HIV patients and their maximum chance of contracting tuberculosis (TB) has become an issue of the past, this disease has now become curable; a  vaccine to protect HIV patients from contracting tuberculosis (TB) has successfully been invented after a struggle of seven years. HIV patients are normally vulnerable to TB because their immune systems are compromised.

After a seven-year-long trial in Africa, scientists have for the first time developed a vaccine that was succesful in reducing the rate of definite TB infection by almost 39% among 2,000 HIV-infected patients in Tanzania.

TB is the biggest killer of HIV-infected patients in the world. In India, over 60% of HIV-infected patients with a weak immunity system get infected with TB and ultimately die of it.

Scientists from Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) have reported results of their clinical trial of this new vaccine against TB -- Mycobacterium vaccae (MV) -- in the January 29 online issue of the journal AIDS. The study will be published in the March print issue of the journal.

Principal investigator Ford von Reyn from DMS said, "Since development of a new vaccine against TB is a major international health priority, especially for patients with HIV infection, we and our Tanzanian collaborators are very encouraged by the results of the study."

The vaccine is a type known as an inactivated, whole-cell mycobacterial vaccine and is expected to be economical to produce and distribute.

Von Reyn described the trial as a "significant milestone -- the first to demonstrate that any type of vaccine can prevent an infectious complication of HIV in adults".

He added that the next steps are to improve the manufacturing methods to support the production of the larger quantities of the TB vaccine needed for further studies and subsequent clinical use.

Health ministry officials in Delhi say the vaccine gives tremendous hope to India which has a huge burden of both TB and HIV patients.

Of the over two million HIV-infected Indians, over 10% are expected to have full blown AIDS. Every AIDS patient has 15% chance every year of developing TB, which shows that every AIDS patient will develop TB some time in his life.

"That's why under India's latest AIDS control programme, we are dealing with TB and HIV simultaneously. When people become infected with TB and AIDS, it is almost always an irreversible formula," ministry officials said.

Since newly-infected HIV patients risk contracting TB almost immediately, investigators are targeting a strategy for immunization with MV before patients need to start taking antiretroviral drugs.

The scientific team at Dartmouth began Phase-I human studies with MV in the United States in 1994 and demonstrated that a multiple-dose series of MV was safe in both healthy subjects and patients with HIV infection. More