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Envisioning future strategies for vaccination against tuberculosis.

Kaufmann SH

Stefan H. E. Kaufmann is at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Department of Immunology, Schumannstrasse 21-22, 10117 Berlin, Germany. kaufmann@mpiib-berlin.mpg.de

The design of tuberculosis vaccines has entered a new era. Although several new vaccine candidates will pass Phase I clinical trials within the next year, I believe that the most effective vaccination strategy will be to combine different vaccine candidates and to use a prime-boost approach. This strategy, however, would require several years of iterative vaccine trials, unless the process is expedited by the identification of reliable biomarkers for assessing vaccine efficacy. In this Essay, I briefly summarize past and present attempts to develop a vaccine against tuberculosis, and I describe, using imagined scenarios, the tuberculosis vaccination schemes that might become available from a large repertoire of candidate schemes in the near and distant future.

Published 25 August 2006 in Nat Rev Immunol, 6(9): 699-704.
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