The new TB vaccines can bring $474 in health benefits and save costs in fighting tuberculosis in lower-income countries, modelling suggests.

The rollout of new-developed tuberculosis (TB) vaccines could bring enormous health and economic benefits, especially in poorer countries, the research suggests.

The researchers, who modelled the impact of vaccine introductions in low- and middle-income countries, managed to prove that an effective new TB vaccine for adolescents and adults would be cost-effective in 73 of 105 (70%) of settings – including all those with a high TB burden – and could produce up to $474 billion in economic benefits by half of the century.

„The scale of these benefits would be on par with some of the most influential health interventions in LMIC settings in recent years,” GAVI, the vaccine alliance, points out.

„While challenges remain, successful development and introduction of a new TB vaccine has potential to accelerate elimination of a disease that represents one of the greatest health threats for poor households,” said Dr Allison Portnoy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who led the study.

BioNTech to begin final clinical trials of its mRNA cancer vaccine

German BioNTech, which developed one of the vaccines for COVID-19, says will begin the final trials of its vaccine against cancer diseases later this year.

 

The company is to use the mRNA technology, for which it got more money, since it …

Europe successful in combating tuberculosis, Eastern part still facing the problem

TB belongs to the world’s leading infectious diseases in terms of number of deaths. In 2021, approximately 10.6 million people came down with TB, and 1.6 million died from it.

„Although TB is curable when treated with antibiotics, drug-resistant TB is a growing problem,” GAVI insists. Meanwhile, millions of infected people are either not diagnosed or not treated, putting them at risk of dying and/or infecting others.

In Europe, the estimated number of TB cases in the WHO European Region has been decreasing consistently since 2000. Between 2011 and 2020, the average annual decline in the TB incidence rate was 5.2 per cent, with 6.4 per cent achieved between 2019 and 2020, which is notably higher than the global rate of decline for TB incidence (1.9 per cent) and the fastest decline in the world compared to other regions, according to the periodic report by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

According to the WHO Regional Office for Europe and ECDC, a sharp 24 per cent drop was reported in notified new and relapse TB cases between 2019 and 2020 which is due, in part, to decreased case detection and reporting as a result of the public health and social measures introduced by countries in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the potential issues of underdiagnosis and underreporting in 2020, 163,602 incident TB cases were notified in the European Region, ECDC reports.

The epidemic patterns and trends vary widely in Europe. In the countries of the European Union and European Economic Area the incidence level is below 10 per 100 000 population, which is low. However, the region has nine of the 30 countries with the highest multidrug-resistant TB burden in the world, ECDC report says.

In Europe, the countries with the highest tuberculosis incidence include Ukraine and Moldova, according to the maps by WHO. Among the EU countries, the highest incidence in 2021, with the results between 10 and 49 incidents for 100 000 population, was reported in Poland, Baltic States, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia and Portugal.

In the world, the most serious situation when it comes to the spread of tuberculosis was reported in Africa, South Asia and the Western part of South America.

In 2021, eight countries accounted for more than two thirds of global TB cases: India (28 per cent), Indonesia (9.2 per cent), China (7.4 per cent), the Philippines (7.0 per cent), Pakistan (5.8 per cent), Nigeria (4.4 per cent), Bangladesh (3.6 per cent) and Democratic Republic of the Congo (2.9 per cent).

EU to share COVID-19 vaccines with China as the country struggles with a new outbreak

With a population of 1.4 billion people, China could face more than a million COVID-19 deaths this year, according to experts.

Breakthrough for the cost-effectiveness of TB preventing measures

While the BCG vaccine, which is used in many countries in children, is moderately effective in preventing severe forms of TB in the youngest age group. Still, it does not adequately protect adults and adolescents, who account for almost 90 per cent of disease transmission, GAVI warns.

Consequently, „developing new safe, affordable, and effective TB vaccines is considered critical for eliminating TB, yet while promising candidates exist, such as the M72/AS01E candidate vaccine, limited market incentives have delayed their development”, the organisation says.

The previous studies proved that tuberculosis has a considerable economic impact. So would be a potential impact of new vaccines. The cost and cost-effectiveness of these vaccines may vary by country. Therefore, country-specific data is needed to help vaccine developers, manufacturers, and potential purchasers decide where to focus their investments.

In the research, published in PLOS Medicine, Portnoy and her colleagues prepared a comprehensive assessment of the costs, cost-savings, and cost-effectiveness that launching novel vaccines would be. The modelling involved different assumptions about vaccine price and delivery strategies, calibrated with data from 105 different LMICs.

"Vaccines and medicines work. We cannot reject several hundreds years of experience" [INTERVIEW]

„I think that life has verified the anti-vaccination attitude. Sometimes the verification was brutal or even fatal” – emphasizes prof. Andrzej Horban, national consultant in the field of infectious diseases.

The benefits of rolling out new vaccines

A new adolescent/adult vaccine, assuming an efficacy of 50 per cent at preventing disease, would bring between $283 billion and $474 billion in economic benefits by 2050, the research team calculated. The benefits would mostly be concentrated in the WHO African and South-East Asian regions.

A new infant vaccine, on the other hand, if an efficacy of 80 per cent efficacy at preventing disease is assumed,would be cost-effective in 56 out of 105 countries, including all of those with a high TB burden, and would produce economic benefits of $44.5 billion to $100 billion, the calculation says.

„There was greater, and more rapid, impact from an adolescent/adult vaccine over the 2028-to-2050-time horizon compared to an infant vaccine, as this vaccine is targeted to a population with the highest burden of TB, and the delay between vaccination and TB prevention impact is shorter with the adolescent/adult vaccine,” wrote the research team.

According to Portnoy, „the results of these analyses can be used by global and country stakeholders to inform TB vaccine policy and introduction preparedness, as well as decision-making around future development, adoption, and implementation of novel TB vaccines.”