Large-Scale Indian Clinical Trial Reveals VPM1002 and Immuvac Vaccines Fail to Prevent All Forms of TB

A large-scale study in India finds VPM1002 and Immuvac vaccines safe but unable to provide broad protection against pulmonary TB in adults and children.

By: AXL Media

Published: Apr 10, 2026, 3:52 AM EDT

Source: Information for this report was sourced from BMJ Group

Stagnant Progress in the Global Fight Against Tuberculosis

According to data from the World Health Organization, tuberculosis remains the world’s leading infectious disease killer, with an estimated 10.8 million new cases reported in 2023. Despite the longstanding use of the BCG vaccine, which protects young children from severe complications, there remains a critical gap in immunity for adolescents and adults. To address this, a large-scale trial published in The BMJ today evaluated two modern candidates, VPM1002 and Immuvac, across 18 sites in India. The study represents one of the most significant efforts to find a successor to the century-old BCG strain, yet the results highlight the immense difficulty in achieving total protection against the TB bacterium.

Primary Efficacy Benchmarks and Latent Infection

The research team enrolled 12,717 household contacts of confirmed TB patients, a group considered to be at the highest risk for transmission. Between 2019 and 2022, participants received two doses of either a candidate vaccine or a placebo. Despite rigorous follow-up, the trial results showed that neither VPM1002 nor Immuvac provided general protection against all forms of tuberculosis or prevented latent infections from taking hold. The inability of these vaccines to halt the initial infection suggests that while they may modulate how the disease manifests, they do not currently serve as a "silver bullet" for stopping the spread of the pathogen within domestic settings.

Targeted Success Against Extrapulmonary Disease

While the vaccines failed to meet the primary goal of preventing pulmonary tuberculosis, the recombinant vaccine VPM1002 demonstrated a notable benefit in preventing extrapulmonary tuberculosis. Data indicates an efficacy rate of 50.4% against this specific form of the disease, which affects organs other than the lungs and often carries a higher mortality risk. This protective effect was even more pronounced in adults aged 36 to 60, where efficacy reached 79.5%. These findings suggest that VPM1002 may play a specialized role in public health by reducing the severity and spread of the disease to critical organ systems, even if it cannot fully prevent lung-based infections.