Impact of proteomics on anti-Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) vaccine development

Tuberculosis is a serious infection disease which causes more than two million deaths annually. The TB pandemic has continued despite widespread use of the only available licensed TB vaccine--Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG). Additionally, the increasing incidences of multidrug resistant strains and coinfection with HIV mean that tuberculosis constitutes a growing global threat. Thus, improvement of the vaccination strategy against TB is an urgent need, requiring international cooperation of the research community. The completion of many mycobacterial genome sequences has greatly facilitated the global analysis at the transcriptome and proteome level. This in consequence has accelerated progress in the vaccinology field resulting in identification of a large numbers of antigens with potential in TB vaccines. This review concentrates on the proteomic contribution to TB vaccinology. At the end of the article some recent achievements of structural proteomics and developing an epitope-driven tuberculosis vaccine are presented.