Recent developments in systems biology and genetic engineering toward design of vaccines for TB

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the most prevalent diseases worldwide. The currently available Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine is not sufficient in protecting against pulmonary TB. Although many vaccines have been evaluated in clinical trials, but none of them yet has proven to be more successful. Thus, new strategies are urgently needed to design more effective TB vaccines. The emergence of new technologies will undoubtedly accelerate the process of vaccine development. This review summarizes the potential and validated applications of emerging technologies, including: systems biology (genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics), genetic engineering, and other computational tools to discover and develop novel vaccines against TB. It also discussed that the significant implementation of these approaches will play crucial roles in the development of novel vaccines to cure and control TB.

Keywords:

• Mycobacterium tuberculosis
• systems biology
• bioinformatics
• proteomics
• genomics
• genetic engineering

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health grants (R01-AI132711 and R01-AI149852).