– Through the Marine Products Chemistry group, the institution has established panels of serum protein biomarkers representative of patients with active tuberculosis and their infected or uninfected contacts, contributing to understanding the metabolic complexity associated with the progression of tuberculosis from latent infection to active disease.
Santiago de Compostela, 1 June 2020. The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), one of the 14 partners in the European H2020 project “Eliciting Mucosal Immunity on Tuberculosis”, is presenting the results it has achieved within this research on tuberculosis.
The institution takes part in the project, funded with €323,036, through the Marine Products Chemistry group at the Institute of Marine Research. The European project, which has recently concluded, aimed to design a mucosal vaccine capable of inducing an immune response against tuberculosis, one of the deadliest infectious diseases, and providing broad protective immunity against this pathogen. Other partners include Prof. África González-Fernández from the Immunology group at CINBIO in Vigo and Dr Luis Anibarro from the Tuberculosis Unit of the Provincial Hospital of Pontevedra.
“Tuberculosis, far from being a disease of the past, remains a global health problem. It is estimated that at least a quarter of the world’s population carries the bacillus that causes it, although in latent form,” explain CSIC researchers Dr Mónica Carrera Mouriño and Dr Jesús Mateos Martín.
CSIC’s role in the project, led by St George’s, University of London and launched in 2015, was to identify, through quantitative proteomics studies, specific biomarker panels in different biological fluids (serum, saliva and sputum). These panels are representative of patients with active tuberculosis and of healthy people or people with latent disease after contact with a patient with pulmonary tuberculosis.
“In the latent phase, patients cannot infect another person, have no symptoms and in most cases do not develop the disease. The reasons why the pathogen becomes active and causes tuberculosis remain unclear,” the researchers highlight.
After more than four years of study, CSIC observed that individuals resistant to infection with the tuberculosis bacillus, even after contact with a patient with active disease, had increased levels of proteins related to defence against pathogens in saliva and sputum. It also carried out a study focused on the blood of tuberculosis patients, whose preliminary results point to the importance of metabolism in the transition from asymptomatic latent infection to active disease.
“These findings help us better understand the innate immune response process, both against the tuberculosis bacillus and against other respiratory pathogens, and provide useful information for developing a new, more effective intranasal vaccine,” Mateos and Carrera highlight.
These results have been reported in scientific articles published in Scientific Reports and Journal of Proteomics.