Every day Tuberculosis (TB) kills approximately three thousand people, a number that is on the rise due to the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic on essential TB services. The causative agent... Show moreEvery day Tuberculosis (TB) kills approximately three thousand people, a number that is on the rise due to the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic on essential TB services. The causative agent of TB, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), is an ancient pathogen that through its evolution developed complex mechanisms to evade immune surveillance and acquired the ability to establish persistent infection in its hosts. To achieve TB eradication, the discovery of Mtb antigens that effectively correlate with the human response to infection, with the curative host response following TB treatment, and with natural as well as vaccine induced protection is critical. This thesis contributes to this ambitious aim through several findings. First, it uncovers multiple new in vivo expressed Mtb (IVE-TB) antigens by combining Mtb-transcriptomic data with advanced bioinformatics tools and medium throughput cytokine screening. Second, it deepens our understanding of the cellular and humoral immunity to Mtb antigens in latently Mtb infected donors (LTBIs) and TB patients as well as in animal models. Lastly, it demonstrates the feasibility of combining and integrating pre-clinical research of multiple mycobacterial diseases, which are endemic in the same areas and against which vaccines could induce cross-disease protection (i.e., TB and leprosy). Show less
Coppola, M.; Lai, R.P.J.; Wilkinson, R.J.; Ottenhoff, T.H.M. 2021
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) genes encoding proteins targeted by vaccines and drugs should be expressed in the lung, the main organ affected by Mtb, for these to be effective. However, the... Show moreMycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) genes encoding proteins targeted by vaccines and drugs should be expressed in the lung, the main organ affected by Mtb, for these to be effective. However, the pulmonary expression of most Mtb genes and their proteins remains poorly characterized. The aim of this study is to fill this knowledge gap. We analyzed large scale transcriptomic datasets from specimens of Mtb-infected humans, TB-hypersusceptible (C3H/FeJ) and TB-resistant (C57BL/6J) mice and compared data to in vitro cultured Mtb gene-expression profiles. Results revealed high concordance in the most abundantly in vivo expressed genes between pulmonary Mtb transcriptomes from different datasets and different species. As expected, this contrasted with a lower correlation found with the highest expressed Mtb genes from in vitro datasets. Among the most consistently and highly in vivo expressed genes, 35 have not yet been explored as targets for vaccination or treatment. More than half of these genes are involved in protein synthesis or metabolic pathways. This first lung-oriented multi-study analysis of the in vivo expressed Mtb-transcriptome provides essential data that considerably increase our understanding of pulmonary TB infection biology, and identifies novel molecules for target-based TB-vaccine and drug development. Show less
