Researchers and scientists have been scrambling to find new vaccines and drugs to fight COVID-19. And recently, a 100-year-old vaccine has caught their attention. The vaccine was first developed to fight tuberculosis (TB), but it is now being studied in a handful of clinical trials around the world as a possible method to battle the coronavirus.
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Could the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccine be the answer to COVID-19?
Although TB and COVID-19 are two very different diseases, COVID-19 is caused by a virus while TB is caused by a type of bacteria. According to the director of immunobiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Denise Faustman, she believes that the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine might help people build immune responses to other diseases aside from TB, which causes off-target effects.
Faustman has said that in clinical trials, people have started to pick up positive benefits after receiving the BCG vaccine.
She then studied how the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccine affects people with Type 1 Diabetes. And she also interested in how the off-target effects can change the immune system of a person in ways that are beneficial with those who have Type 1 Diabetes.
While it isn't clear what the exact mechanism is for these off-target effects of the BCG vaccine, researchers understand that this can give a boost to the immune system's response. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still hasn't approved any vaccine or treatment for the novel coronavirus, but researchers are hopeful that the BCG vaccine will be proven to be effective against COVID-19.
An infectious disease specialist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Dr. William Schaffner, has said that it is a very atypical concept. According to Schaffner, "I think BCG vaccine is a bit of the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass and it's such an outside-the-box concept that one would like to be optimistic, but we'll have to wait and see."
Several countries have begun human clinical trials using the BCG vaccine
Australia and the Netherlands, plus several other countries around the world, have begun human clinical trials to study the BCG vaccine's efficacy. Meanwhile, Faustman and her colleagues are now preparing for their Boston trials, which are all under a multistep review process. The team hopes to enroll about 4,000 healthcare workers into the trial.
Faustman said that "BCG is heralded by the World Health Organization as the safest vaccine ever developed in the world. Greater than 3 billion people have gotten it while several countries, including the United States, do not regularly administer the BCG vaccine, it is still used widely in developing countries."
If proven to be effective, the study could play a very important role in the global fight against COVID-19.
