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A team of Montana researchers is playing a key role in the development of a more effective vaccine against tuberculosis, an infectious disease that has killed more people than any other.

This story also ran on U.S. News & World Report. It can be republished for free.

The BCG (Bacille Calmette-Gurin) vaccine, created in 1921, remains the sole TB vaccine. While it is 40% to 80% effective in young children, its efficacy is very low in adolescents and adults, leading to a worldwide push to create a more powerful vaccine.

One effort is underway at the University of Montana Center for Translational Medicine. The center specializes in improving and creating vaccines by adding what are called novel adjuvants. An adjuvant is a substance included in the vaccine, such as fat molecules or aluminum salts, that enhances the immune response, and novel adjuvants are those that have not yet been used in humans. Scientists are finding that adjuvants make for stronger, more precise, and more durable immunity than antigens, which create antibodies, would alone.

Eliciting specific responses from the immune system and deepening and broadening the response with adjuvants is known as precision vaccination. Its not one-size-fits-all, said Ofer Levy, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard University and the head of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Childrens Hospital. A vaccine might work differently in a newborn versus an older adult and a middle-aged person.

The ultimate precision vaccine, said Levy, would be lifelong protection from a disease with one jab. A single-shot protection against influenza or a single-shot protection against covid, that would be the holy grail, Levy said. Email Sign-Up

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Jay Evans, the director of the University of Montana center and the chief scientific and strategy officer and a co-founder of Inimmune, a privately held biotechnology company in Missoula, said his team has been working on a TB vaccine for 15 years. The private-public partnership is developing vaccines and trying to improve existing vaccines, and he said its still five years off before the TB vaccine might be distributed widely.

It has not gone unnoticed at the center that this state-of-the-art vaccine research and production is located in a state that passed one of the nations most extreme anti-vaccination laws during the pandemic in 2021. The law prohibits businesses and governments from discriminating against people who arent vaccinated against covid-19 or other diseases, effectively banning both public and private employers from requiring workers to get vaccinated against covid or any other disease. A federal judge later ruled that the law cannot be enforced in health care settings, such as hospitals and doctors offices.

In mid-March, the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute announced it had begun the third and final phase of clinical trials for the new vaccine in seven countries. The trials should take about five years to complete. Research and production are being done in several places, including at a manufacturing facility in Hamilton owned by GSK, a giant pharmaceutical company.

Known as the forgotten pandemic, TB kills up to 1.6 million people a year, mostly in impoverished areas in Asia and Africa, despite its being both preventable and treatable. The U.S. has seen an increase in tuberculosis over the past decade, especially with the influx of migrants, and the number of cases rose by 16% from 2022 to 2023. Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death among people living with HIV, whose risk of contracting a TB infection is 20 times as great as people without HIV.

TB is a complex pathogen that has been with human beings for ages, said Alemnew Dagnew, who heads the program for the new vaccine for the Gates Medical Research Institute. Because it has been with human beings for many years, it has evolved and has a mechanism to escape the immune system. And the immunology of TB is not fully understood.

The University of Montana Center for Translational Medicine and Inimmune together have 80 employees who specialize in researching a range of adjuvants to understand the specifics of immune responses to different substances. You have to tailor it like tools in a toolbox towards the pathogen you are vaccinating against, Evans said. We have a whole library of adjuvant molecules and formulations.

Vaccines are made more precise largely by using adjuvants. There are three basic types of natural adjuvants: aluminum salts; squalene, which is made from shark liver; and some kinds of saponins, which are fat molecules. Its not fully understood how they stimulate the immune system. The center in Missoula has also created and patented a synthetic adjuvant, UM-1098, that drives a specific type of immune response and will be added to new vaccines.

One of the most promising molecules being used to juice up the immune system response to vaccines is a saponin molecule from the bark of the quillay tree, gathered in Chile from trees at least 10 years old. Such molecules were used by Novavax in its covid vaccine and by GSK in its widely used shingles vaccine, Shingrix. These molecules are also a key component in the new tuberculosis vaccine, known as the M72 vaccine. More from the Mountain States

But there is room for improvement.

The vaccine shows 50% efficacy, which doesnt sound like much, but basically there is no effective vaccine currently, so 50% is better than whats out there, Evans said. Were looking to take what we learned from that vaccine development with additional adjuvants to try and make it even better and move 50% to 80% or more.

By contrast, measles vaccines are 95% effective.

According to Medscape, around 15 vaccine candidates are being developed to replace the BCG vaccine, and three of them are in phase 3 clinical trials.

One approach Evans center is researching to improve the new vaccines efficacy is taking a piece of the bacterium that causes TB, synthesizing it, and combining it with the adjuvant QS-21, made from the quillay tree. It stimulates the immune system in a way that is specific to TB and it drives an immune response that is even closer to what we get from natural infections, Evans said.

The University of Montana center is researching the treatment of several problems not commonly thought of as treatable with vaccines. They are entering the first phase of clinical trials for a vaccine for allergies, for instance, and first-phase trials for a cancer vaccine. And later this year, clinical trials will begin for vaccines to block the effects of opioids like heroin and fentanyl. The University of Montana received the largest grant in its history, $33 million, for anti-opioid vaccine research. It works by creating an antibody that binds with the drug in the bloodstream, which keeps it from entering the brain and creating the high.

For now, though, the eyes of health care experts around the world are on the trials for the new TB vaccines, which, if they are successful, could help save countless lives in the worlds poorest places. Related Topics Pharmaceuticals Public Health States Children's Health Montana Vaccines Contact Us Submit a Story Tip

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Regulators must catch up to the new privacy paradigm

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November 9, 2025

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Regulators must catch up to the new privacy paradigm

Opinion by: Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology

A new consensus is forming across the Web3 world. For years, privacy was treated as a compliance problem, liability for developers and at best, a niche concern. Now it is becoming clear that privacy is actually what digital freedom is built on. 

The Ethereum Foundation’s announcement of the Privacy Cluster — a cross-team effort focused on private reads and writes, confidential identities and zero-knowledge proofs — is a sign of a philosophical redefinition of what trust, consensus and truth mean in the digital age and a more profound realization that privacy must be built into infrastructure.

Regulators should pay attention. Privacy-preserving designs are no longer just experimental; they are now a standard approach. They are becoming the way forward for decentralized systems. The question is whether law and regulation will adopt this shift or remain stuck in an outdated logic that equates visibility with safety.

From shared observation to shared verification

For a long time, digital governance has been built on a logic of visibility. Systems were trustworthy because they could be observed by regulators, auditors or the public. This “shared observation” model is behind everything from financial reporting to blockchain explorers. Transparency was the means of ensuring integrity.

In cryptographic systems, however, a more powerful paradigm is emerging: shared verification. Instead of every actor seeing everything, zero-knowledge proofs and privacy-preserving designs enable verifying that a rule was followed without revealing the underlying data. Truth becomes something you can prove, not something you must expose.

This shift might seem technical, but it has profound consequences. It means we no longer need to pick between privacy and accountability. Both can coexist, embedded directly into the systems we rely on. Regulators, too, must adapt to this logic rather than battle against it.

Privacy as infrastructure

The industry is realizing the same thing: Privacy is not a niche. It’s infrastructure. Without it, the Web3 openness becomes its weakness, and transparency collapses into surveillance.

Emerging architectures across ecosystems demonstrate that privacy and modularity are finally converging. Ethereum’s Privacy Cluster focuses on confidential computation and selective disclosure at the smart-contract level. 

Others are going deeper, integrating privacy into the network consensus itself: sender-unlinkable messaging, validator anonymity, private proof-of-stake and self-healing data persistence. These designs are rebuilding the digital stack from the ground up, aligning privacy, verifiability and decentralization as mutually reinforcing properties.

This is not an incremental improvement. It is a new way of thinking about freedom in the digital network age.

Policy is lagging behind the technology

Current regulatory approaches still reflect the logic of shared observation. Privacy-preserving technologies are scrutinized or restricted, while visibility is mistaken for safety and compliance. Developers of privacy protocols face regulatory pressure, and policymakers continue to think that encryption is an obstacle to observability.

This perspective is outdated and dangerous. In a world where everyone is being watched, and where data is harvested on an unprecedented scale, bought, sold, leaked and exploited, the absence of privacy is the actual systemic risk. It undermines trust, puts people at risk and makes democracies weaker. By contrast, privacy-preserving designs make integrity provable and enable accountability without exposure. 

Lawmakers must begin to view privacy as an ally, not an adversary — a tool for enforcing fundamental rights and restoring confidence in digital environments.

Stewardship, not just scrutiny

The next phase of digital regulation must move from scrutiny to support. Legal and policy frameworks should protect privacy-preserving open source systems as critical public goods. Stewardship stance is a duty, not a policy choice.

Related: Compliance isn’t supposed to cost you your privacy

It means providing legal clarity for developers and distinguishing between acts and architecture. Laws should punish misconduct, not the existence of technologies that enable privacy. The right to maintain private digital communication, association and economic exchange must be treated as a fundamental right, enforced by both law and infrastructure.

Such an approach would demonstrate regulatory maturity, recognizing that resilient democracies and legitimate governance rely on privacy-preserving infrastructure.

The architecture of freedom

The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy initiative and other new privacy-first network designs share the idea that freedom in the digital age is an architectural principle. It cannot depend solely on promises of good governance or oversight; it must be built into protocols that shape our lives.

These new systems, private rollups, state-separated architectures and sovereign zones represent the practical synthesis of privacy and modularity. They enable communities to build independently while remaining verifiably connected, thereby combining autonomy with accountability.

Policymakers should view this as an opportunity to support the direct embedding of fundamental rights into the technical foundation of the internet. Privacy-by-design should be embraced as legality-by-design, a way to enforce fundamental rights through code, not just through constitutions, charters and conventions.

The blockchain industry is redefining what “consensus” and “truth” mean, replacing shared observation with shared verification, visibility with verifiability, and surveillance with sovereignty. As this new dawn for privacy takes shape, regulators face a choice: Limit it under the old frameworks of control, or support it as the foundation of digital freedom and a more resilient digital order.

The tech is getting ready. The laws need to catch up.

Opinion by: Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.