Developments in Brief : Multipurpose Vaccine Development Gains

Researchers have inserted foreign genes into a bacterium now used as a tuberculosis vaccine, a step that may lead to a multipurpose vaccine against leprosy, malaria and other diseases.

The genes were inserted by a man-made “shuttle,” a combination of a genes from a virus and genetic material from another kind of bacterium, scientists report in the current issue of Nature.

The shuttle infects the “BCG” bacterium that has been used as a tuberculosis vaccine in about 5 billion people worldwide, the researchers wrote.

BCG, which stands for bacille Calmette-Guerin, is a harmless strain of a family of bacteria called mycobacteria. Other kinds of mycobacteria cause tuberculosis and leprosy.

The new research is reported by Barry Bloom, William R. Jacobs Jr. and Margareta Tuckman of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Although the work demonstrates that the shuttle can insert foreign genes into the BCG bacterium, researchers have not yet shown that the inserted genes continue to work, as would be needed to create a multipurpose vaccine, Jacobs said.

The hope is that selected genes from disease-causing organisms could be combined in a BCG bacterium vaccine, which would then raise bodily defenses against those organisms, he said.