The Rector of the University of Zaragoza, elected new president of the European alliance of universities UNITA
1 December, 2021
Presentation of the diptych 'After the death of a loved one by suicide'
3 December, 2021
The professor of Microbiology at the University of Zaragoza will receive the Medal of Justice of Aragon on December 20 for his professional excellence and international projection.
Congratulations, how do you feel knowing that you have been granted this important recognition in your own land?
I think it is a recognition of the hard work of many years of the Mycobacteria Genetics Group that I have directed since 1992. Once we designed the MTBVAC vaccine after typing the tuberculosis strains, seeing which ones were most dangerous, the multidrug-resistant ones, and observing the gene that activated all the virulence, we were very naive thinking that in three or four years we would have managed to develop it. But there is still a way to go.
It is being a long process.
Yes, and since our vaccine candidate is based on a simple idea, as Pasteur did, attenuating the pathogen, in this case the Koch bacillus, and injecting it again to protect against the disease, no one believed that they would give us permission. But it was studied in Switzerland for two years in the best tuberculosis vaccine center in the world and in 2012 we obtained permission to work on healthy adult humans. And that made it possible for the Galician company Biofabri, with which the University of Zaragoza has worked since 2008, to now have authorization to manufacture vaccines against Covid-19.
That is to say, indirectly, the MTBVAC vaccine project has allowed millions of doses of vaccine against Covid-19 to be produced in Spain.
Of course, that means that all the research carried out since 1992 with continuously funded European projects has already produced great results.
But is it normal that the vaccine against Covid-19 is achieved in record time and the vaccine against tuberculosis is not yet definitively approved?
The same thing happens with AIDS, whose HIV virus was sequenced 40 years ago and the vaccine has not been achieved, and the same thing happens with malaria... They are much more complex because they need cellular immunity, it is not enough to have antibodies to protect you. . Any vaccine worth its salt always takes between 15, 20 or 25 years to achieve. The record has been that of covid-19 because each of the candidates received an injection of 1.000 million dollars.
"Receiving the Aragón Justice Medal means recognizing hard work, even stubbornness, and also the social commitment and international impact of our project."
Does the fact that tuberculosis is a disease considered "of the poor" have to do with the fact that it has not yet been achieved?
Yes, it is the disease of poverty and there is treatment, it seems that it affects us little, but be careful how multi-resistant strains arrive in the respiratory form of tuberculosis! That's why Europe and the United States give money, it's not out of altruism.
That is to say, it is selfishly in the interest of the first world to get this vaccine.
But not to the big pharmaceutical companies, because no one is going to pay it, the State has to pay it. In our case, the vaccine will be cheap, because what the University of Zaragoza has signed with Biofabri is that it has to be affordable for developing countries. That is why it is true that the project fulfills the social and justice commitment referred to in the awarding of the Aragón Justice Medal.
Has the current covid-19 pandemic been of any use?
Yes, it has helped us know that a vaccine can be accelerated when there is an emergency, and in the case of the coronavirus the WHO declared it in 2020, but in the case of tuberculosis it had been declared an emergency in 1993 and it has not been accelerated. And it has to be nations, not a company, as we have been defending. That is why the Aragonese values that the Justiciazgo highlights when granting us the award, such as stubbornness, are guaranteed to us (laughs). And the international impact too, because the WHO considers our vaccine the most promising candidate to replace the current BCG because it has demonstrated its protection in the respiratory forms of the disease.
So can the process be sped up?
Yes, at any time, if someone decides now, via a foundation, or Amancio Ortega, or a bank, to put money in to accelerate it and Spain leads it, because foreigners are not going to lead it unless you give them the vaccine.
If you have the financial resources, how long would it take?
Nothing! Because if it is tested in a large adult population, as has been done with Covid, you vaccinate 30.000 people and in a year you can obtain results. With the Carlos III Institute we are looking for a country that is Spanish-speaking, that has a high incidence of tuberculosis...
There are few candidates...
And make it one less island... There is a delegation from Guinea that has visited Zendal and the Carlos III, because Fernando Poo, Bioko, where 'Palms in the Snow' by Luz Gabás takes place, could be. If Spain flagged the tuberculosis vaccine as it did with the smallpox vaccine, then it could be obtained in record time.
It also stands out in the awarding of the Aragon Medal of Justice that it is a multidisciplinary team that has developed the entire project.
Yes, we are biotechnologists, doctors, veterinarians...
And each one develops other lines of research
Yes, Nacho Aguiló immunology, and now also bladder cancer with treatment with the BCG vaccine; Jesús Gonzalo genetics, mouse models...
As a microbiologist, do you think we have many waves of Covid left?
We have much left to learn. Now we are seeing that vaccines do not protect 100% against transmission, but we have also seen that they protect against very serious forms of disease. Martinón presented it yesterday: the curves from before have nothing to do with those from now if you compare the cases and the number of admitted people and people in the ICU.
He already said in his day that the SARS-Cov-2 virus tends to lose virulence as it mutates into new variants.
In theory, and Enjuanes was talking about it yesterday, the virus tends to lose that virulence, because if it does not kill the host, and looks for a method of transmitting itself between unvaccinated people: before we did not see cases in children, now we are seeing them because they are the only ones left to vaccinate. On a scientific level, the vaccines have been an impressive achievement, and that they are so different because neither viral nor RNA vaccines had been used en masse until now. We have seen that they have side effects like any vaccine, but the benefit is enormous. And in Spain we have been lucky that people get vaccinated although it is not mandatory.
