Profiling the host immune response to tuberculosis vaccines.

There is an urgent need for improved vaccines for protection against tuberculosis (TB) disease and an immune correlate of protection would aid in the design, development and testing of a new TB vaccine candidates. The immune response to TB is likely to be multi-factorial and transcriptional profiling is a potentially useful tool for the simultaneous measurement of multiple immune processes. Although there are 16 candidate TB vaccines in clinical development the only published transcriptomics studies are from the MVA85A trials. With the publication of transcriptional signatures from the South African adolescent cohort study and the GC6 consortium also expected in 2015 the next year could see an increase of interest in the use of transcriptomics in TB vaccine development.