• Juliane Radloff, Jan Heyckendorf, Lize van der Merwe, Patricia Sanchez Carballo, Norbert Reiling, Elvira Richter, Christoph Lange, and Barbara Kalsdorf.
• Division of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Research Center Borstel, Borstel, Germany.
• Front Immunol. 2018 Jan 1; 9: 1708.

BackgroundIn order to eliminate tuberculosis (TB), an effective vaccine is urgently needed to prevent infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. A key obstacle for the development of novel TB vaccines is the lack of surrogate markers for immune protection against M. tuberculosis.MethodsWe investigated growth rates of M. tuberculosis in the mycobacterial growth inhibition assay (MGIA) as a marker for mycobacterial growth control of human bronchoalveolar lavage (BALC) and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) before and after vaccination with Mycobacterium bovis Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) of healthy adult volunteers.ResultsVaccination induced a positive response (p < 0.001) to purified protein derivate (PPD) in 58.8% of the individuals in an interferon-γ release assay-ELISpot. Intraindividual evaluation of the MGIA growth rates before and after M. bovis BCG-vaccination revealed no significant difference in time to culture positivity before and after vaccination in BALC (p = 0.604) and PBMC (p = 0.199). The magnitude of the PPD-response induced by M. bovis BCG-vaccination did not correlate with growth control in BALC and PBMC (correlation = 0.468, 95% CI: -0.016 to 0.775).ConclusionIn conclusion, M. bovis BCG-vaccination-induced mycobacterial-specific cytokine immune response does not result in functional immune control against M. tuberculosis in the MGIA.

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