Goodbye, BCG?
The first Russian tuberculosis vaccine may appear in 2019
The first domestic tuberculosis vaccine may be registered as early as 2019. Artem Tkachuk, head of the Translational Biomedicine laboratory at the National Research Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology named after Honorary Academician N. F. Gamalei, told reporters about this on Wednesday.
"If everything goes well, we plan to complete the research cycle in 2019, and then there will be a question of registering our vaccine with Roszdravnadzor and putting it on the market," he said.
Tkachuk recalled that in Russia today the BCG vaccine is used for vaccination against tuberculosis, invented more than 100 years ago. "BCG is living bacteria. Our vaccine is components that are obtained biotechnologically under controlled conditions, it is not a live vaccine. The complications that occur from BCG, they may be related precisely to the fact that this is a live vaccine," he explained.
According to Tkachuk, the development of the vaccine began in 2010. At the end of 2017, the first stage of clinical trials on 60 volunteers was completed. This year, the second stage of clinical trials of the vaccine on 300 volunteers is planned. About 60 million rubles have been allocated for these purposes, he said.
Tkachuk recalled that today the incidence of tuberculosis in Russia is about 60 cases per 100 thousand population. It is several times higher compared to European countries, but much lower than Asian countries, he added.
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