Optimizing Tuberculosis Prevention: New Collaboration Aims to Accelerate and De-risk the
Discovery and Development of Targeted Adjuvant Anti-TB Vaccines
Boston, MA, August 24th , 2020, The Mueller Health Foundation, a private foundation dedicated to supporting innovative, accessible and affordable solutions to generate transformational treatment modalities and ultimately cures for lethal infectious diseases across the globe is pleased to announce a strategic collaboration with the Precision Vaccines Program (PVP) at Boston’s Children Hospital, which fosters international collaboration among academia, government and industry to employ advanced technologies to discover and develop vaccines tailored to protect vulnerable populations such as the very young and the elderly. The main focus for the Mueller Health Foundation has been primarily on the management of multidrug resistance (MDR), extensively drug resistant (XDR) and programmatically incurable forms of tuberculosis (totally drug resistant tuberculosis), which pose enormous challenges similar to those in the “pre-Antibiotics” era. The Mueller Health Foundation will partner with the PVP to establish a working group to advance and implement an optimal Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine. In addition, the teams will collaborate in the discovery of a novel adjuvanted tuberculosis (TB) vaccine and create educational videos to communicate and raise awareness of the importance of TB vaccines and treatment options.
“Our mission at the Mueller Health Foundation is to pioneer the use of precision medicine with the goal of exploring novel ways of making existing TB vaccines more effective for all types of patients,” said Dr. Peter Mueller, President of the Mueller Health Foundation. He also states: “We are very excited about the collaboration with the Precision Vaccines Program and in the long run hope to revolutionize the vaccine field by researching and discovering new adjuvanted TB vaccines that can help to save many lives in the future.”
“The PVP faculty, including Drs. David Dowling and Asimenia Angelidou, bring unique multidisciplinary skills to these crucial topics; we look forward to partnering with the Mueller Health Foundation in moving this work forward,” said Ofer Levy, MD, PhD, Director of the PVP.
“Historically, tuberculosis has been the biggest infectious-disease killer worldwide, claiming upwards of 1.5 million lives each year,” said David Dowling, PhD Lead of the Adjuvant Discovery & Development Laboratory within the PVP. Dowling further elaborated, “in our efforts to implement an optimal anti-TB vaccine, we will utilize novel multidisciplinary approaches which promise to accelerate and de-risk to use of targeted adjuvant discovery and development.”
“BCG vaccine has been the only effective licensed vaccine for TB for the last 100 years and has been recently shown to have beneficial health effects beyond TB prevention. We are excited to partner with the Mueller Health Foundation to research the current landscape of BCG vaccines and optimize their use for TB prevention and beyond,” said Asimenia Angelidou, MD, PhD, Neonatologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, PVP faculty member and Instructor of Pediatrics at HMS.
About Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis has been named by WHO as one of 10 leading causes of death in the world and it is a disease that occurs in every part of the world. According to WHO latest report in 2019, an estimated 10 million people fell ill with tuberculosis worldwide in 2018. This included 5.7 million men, 3.2 million women and 1.1 million children. An estimated 1.5 million people died of the disease in 2018. There were cases in all countries and age groups. In 2018, the 30 high TB burden countries accounted for 87% of new TB cases. Eight countries account for two thirds of the total, with India leading the count, followed by, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and South Africa. Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) remains a public health crisis and
a health security threat. WHO estimates that there were 484 000 new cases with resistance to Rifampicin. While the TB incidence is falling at about 2% per year globally, this rate needs to be accelerated to a 4–5% annual decline to reach health targets of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. (Source: WHO 2019 Global Tuberculosis Report)
About The Mueller Health Foundation
The Mueller Health Foundation is a family-led, philanthropic organization installed in February 2015 that prides itself on supporting innovative, accessible and affordable solutions to generate transformational treatment modalities and ultimately cures for lethal infectious diseases across the globe. The Mueller Health Foundation accomplishes this by addressing latency and increased antimicrobial resistance as the underlying core problem. Since inception of The Mueller Health Foundation, the main focus has been primarily on the management of multidrug resistance (MDR), extensively drug resistant (XDR) and programmatically incurable forms of tuberculosis
(totally drug resistant tuberculosis). The Mueller Health Foundation focuses on core functions to address tuberculosis that include:
•Funding bold and innovative research to find new treatment solutions for TB in its latent state as well as for multi-drug resistant strains of TB (MDR-TB);
• Funding innovative research to find new vaccines for TB and for making existing TB vaccines more effectiveness for a broader population;
• Developing new strategies and educational programs geared toward TB prevention, care and control;
• Fostering the collection and access to valuable TB data and knowledge by using state of the art technologies such as Blockchain and AI; and
• Supporting and engaging in cross-sectoral partnerships to fight against TB. For more information, please visit: please visit: www.muellerhealthfoundation.org
About The Precision Vaccines Program (PVP)
Established in 2016, the Precision Vaccines Program (PVP) fosters international collaboration among academia, government and industry to employ advanced technologies to discover and develop vaccines tailored to protect vulnerable populations such as the very young and the elderly. Program members have domain expertise in vaccinology, clinical trials, immunology, molecular biology, administration, data management, biostatistics, bioinformatics, and systems biology. The Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital has developed a multidisciplinary team to advance vaccine development, including (a) development of human in vitro models to accelerate and de-risk targeted vaccine development, b) use of systems biology including proteomics and metabolomics, (c) a robust Data Management Core implementing data security, quality control, quality assurance and integration, and (d) development of local and collaborative social media and documentary to disseminate findings to the lay public. For more information, please visit:
http://www.childrenshospital.org/research/departments-divisions-programs/departments/pediatrics/precision-vaccines-program
Contact:
Judith Mueller
Executive Director
The Mueller Health Foundation
T: +1 508-333-1184
judith@muellerhealthfoundation.org