Department of Tropical Diseases, Naval Medical University, Shanghai, China.
Front Immunol. 2023 Nov 2;14:1238649. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2023.1238649. eCollection 2023.
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a serious public health threat around the world. An effective vaccine is urgently required for cost-effective, long-term control of TB. However, the only licensed vaccine Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) is limited to prevent TB for its highly variable efficacy. Substantial progress has been made in research and development (R&D) of TB vaccines in the past decades, and a dozen vaccine candidates, including live attenuated mycobacterial vaccines, killed mycobacterial vaccines, adjuvanted subunit vaccines, viral vector vaccines, and messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines were developed in clinical trials to date. Nevertheless, many challenges to the successful authorization for the use and deployment of an effective tuberculosis vaccine remain. Therefore, it is still necessary and urgent to continue exploring new vaccine construction approaches. Virus-like particles (VLPs) present excellent prospects in the field of vaccine development because of their helpful immunological features such as being safe templates without containing viral nucleic acid, repetitive surface geometry, conformational epitopes similar to natural viruses, and enhancing both innate and adaptive immune responses. The marketization process of VLP vaccines has never stopped despite VLP vaccines face several shortcomings such as their complex and slow development process and high production cost, and several VLP-based vaccines, including vaccines against Human papillomavirus (HPV), Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) and malaria, are successfully licensed for use at the market. In this review, we provide an update on the current progress regarding the development of TB vaccines in clinical trials and seek to give an overview of VLP-based TB vaccine candidates.
结核病（TB）仍然是全球严重的公共卫生威胁。迫切需要一种有效的疫苗来实现具有成本效益的、长期的结核病控制。然而，唯一获得许可的疫苗卡介苗（BCG）由于其功效高度可变，仅限于预防结核病。在过去几十年中，结核病疫苗的研究和开发（R&D）取得了重大进展，目前已有十几个疫苗候选物，包括减毒活分枝杆菌疫苗、死菌疫苗、佐剂亚单位疫苗、病毒载体疫苗和信使 RNA（mRNA）疫苗，已进入临床试验阶段。然而，要成功授权使用和部署有效的结核病疫苗，仍然存在许多挑战。因此，继续探索新的疫苗构建方法仍然是必要和紧迫的。病毒样颗粒（VLPs）由于其具有免疫帮助的特性，如作为不含病毒核酸的安全模板、重复的表面几何形状、与天然病毒相似的构象表位以及增强固有和适应性免疫反应，在疫苗开发领域具有广阔的前景。尽管 VLP 疫苗面临着复杂和缓慢的开发过程以及高生产成本等缺点，但 VLP 疫苗的市场化进程从未停止，包括针对人乳头瘤病毒（HPV）、乙型肝炎病毒（HBV）和疟疾的疫苗在内的几种 VLP 疫苗已成功获得市场许可。在这篇综述中，我们提供了结核病疫苗临床试验进展的最新情况，并概述了基于 VLP 的结核病疫苗候选物。
