SRA

RhCMV-based TB vaccines are able to elicit and maintain immune effector responses that can control Mtb at the earliest stages of infection, and the protection afforded by this vaccine can be complete, if not sterilizing. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of complete prevention of TB disease in Rhesus Macaques (RM) by a long-acting vaccine after highly pathogenic (Erdman strain) Mtb challenge. Overall design: To test the hypothesis whether vaccination with RhCMV/TB would elicit more effective immunity than BCG, and/or enhance the efficacy of BCG, we vaccinated 3 groups of RM (n=7/group; all naturally RhCMV-infected and therefore RhCMV infected at study assignment) with the following vaccines: 1) RhCMV/TB alone 2) CMV alone and 3)BCG + CMV. We will refere to this as Study 1. To confirm and further characterize RhCMV/TB efficacy, we performed a second larger Mtb challenge study (n=9/group; all RhCMV+ at assignment) in which we compared the same 68-1 RhCMV/TB-9 Ag vaccine used in Study 1 (group 1) with an analogous RhCMV/TB-9 Ag vaccine based on the 68-1.2 RhCMV backbone (group 2), and a single 68-1 RhCMV/TB-6 Ag vector expressing a single 6 Ag Mtb polyprotein (Ag85A; ESAT-6; Rv3407; Rv2626; Rpf A; Rpf D) (group 3)