A century-old disease is about to face a brand new weapon — and India just agreed to build it.
Serum Institute of India is putting over $100 million on the table to manufacture a tuberculosis vaccine that doesn't even have final trial results yet.
That's not a typo.
That's a bet.
Here's why it matters.
TB kills more people every year than any other single infectious disease on Earth.
🦠 10.7 million people fall ill with TB annually
⚰️ 1.23 million die from it every year
🌍 1 in 4 humans on the planet carry the bacteria
And the last new TB vaccine? That was BCG, introduced over 100 years ago.
It's a new vaccine candidate, currently deep in Phase 3 trials.
20,000 participants.
5 countries — South Africa, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Indonesia.
54 trial sites.
Full enrollment locked in by April 2025.
Big number, bigger stakes.
In earlier Phase 2b trials, it showed roughly 50% protection against progression to active TB, over three years, in infected adults.
For a disease with no real vaccine upgrade in a century — that's a genuine breakthrough signal.
This is the part that should stop your scroll.
SII isn't waiting for the trial to finish before building capacity.
It's investing now — transferring tech, training people, scaling up — so that if the trial succeeds, there's zero delay getting doses to the world.
Gates MRI is sponsoring the trial. GSK, the original inventor, supplies the adjuvant. SII builds the scale.
Three players, one shot at ending a century of stagnation.
SII has done this before — it's the reason the world got affordable, WHO-approved vaccines at scale during COVID.
Now it's doing it again, for a killer that never made global headlines the way a pandemic did.
No drama. No lockdowns. Just 1.23 million quiet deaths a year.
If M72/AS01E clears Phase 3, Pune could become the launchpad for the biggest TB shift in generations.
And the world won't have to wait a second longer for it to reach the people who need it most.
That's all for now!
