Tuberculosis vaccine: pipeline approaches and future prospective

Tuberculosis (TB), despite anti-mycobacterial therapies and vaccine, is a deadly infectious disease with about 12 million incident cases worldwide. Existing Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine is unquestionably inexpensive, safe and effective against severe forms of childhood TB but appears to be limited in effectiveness against adult pulmonary disease in endemic areas. Genetic variation in the population is the major obstruction inhibiting validation of biomarkers for protective human immunity against TB. Since current TB cases are presenting new challenges with threats of HIV co-infection therefore various attempts at a global platform are being made to develop a new modified vaccine against it. Consequently, Modified Vaccinia Ankara virus (MVA) vectored MPT64 & Ag85A delivery and polyvalent DNA vaccine, expressing an ESAT6–Ag85B fusion protein etc. are preclinically tested for boosted immune effects. However, better vaccine approaches still need to be developed against M. tuberculosis which can be unbeaten in most infected areas

Symmetric Multiplets in Quantum Algebras

We consider a modified version of the coproduct for \U(\su_q(2)) and show that in the limit when $q \rightarrow 1$, there exists an essentially non-cocommutative coproduct. We study the implications of this non-cocommutativity for a system of two spin-$1/2$ particles. Here it is shown that, unlike the usual case, this non-trivial coproduct allows for symmetric and anti-symmetric states to be present in the multiplet. We surmise that our analysis could be related to the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic cases of the Heisenberg magnets.Comment: Needs subeqnarray.sty. To be published in Mod Phys Lett.

Cosmic Evolution in Generalised Brans-Dicke Theory

We have studied the Generalised Brans-Dicke theory and obtained exact solutions of a(t),phi(t),and omega(t) for different epochs of the cosmic evolution .We discuss how inflation,decceleration,cosmic acceleration can result from this solution.The time variation of G(t) is also examined.Comment: 12 pages, no figure