Project Coordinator: Stefan Kaufmann
Institution: Max Planck Society (Germany)
Target disease: Tuberculosis
African countries involved: Ethiopia, South Africa and Uganda
Budget: € 10,643,327
Duration of the project: October 2011-June 2013

The overall objective of this project is to build a sustainable platform where knowledge and know-how on clinical trials of ongoing and future clinical TB vaccine evaluations in Europe and Africa can be exchanged; joint activities can be explored and coordinated; clinical trials capacity will be improved, broadened, integrated; and overlap and unnecessary duplication of work will be prevented by the creation of synergies. The platform will have a specific emphasis on current and novel assays for evaluating the immune response to vaccination in a clinical setting. Activities will be coordinated through expanding and strengthening of an already existing European network, TBVI, which supports European institutions in the development of novel TB vaccines. This existing network will be expanded and strengthened by integrating and coordinating the individual research initiatives on five TB vaccine candidates. To achieve this, activities will focus on the vaccine candidates VPM1002, H1/IC31 and MVA85A that are currently evaluated in Phase I and II studies in Africa; and on vaccine candidates MTBVAC and HBHA which are entering Phase I evaluation in Europe, but aim to enter evaluation in endemic African countries in the near future.