A Global Overview of Tuberculosis Vaccine Development

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world; therefore, controlling TB epidemics is one of the main priorities of global public health.According to the priorities of the World Health Organization, developing and designing new vaccines are needed more than ever to control the spread of this disease.Meanwhile, efforts to produce new drugs against the infection can be effective for the treatment of the disease.Today, the only approved vaccine for TB prevention is Bacille Calmette-Guerin (widely known as BCG) which cannot provide immunity in adults.As a result, researchers have done many investigations in clinical development and preclinical trials to prepare new vaccines and to examine new candidates to replace or enhance BCG vaccine.This review investigates the history of BCG vaccine, its limitations as well as recent advances to improve its immunogenicity while reducing its side effects.Moreover, other TB vaccines along with new TB vaccine candidates in clinical trials are presented in this article.