Dr. Julius Mugweru – Inventor/Innovator of the Year Award (2023)

Dr. Julius Mugweru, a lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Embu has been awarded the 2023 Inventor/Innovator or the Year Award for his contribution to vaccine development and treatment of drug resistant tuberculosis (TB). Dr Mugweru holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease, Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, China. He has been a Research Fellow at the Okayama University’s Institute of Plant Sciences and Resources Japan, and a postdoctoral fellow at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.

In December 2022, Dr Mugweru was jointly granted a patent together with Zhang, Wang, Chiwala and Liu for their invention entitled “CONSTRUCTION METHOD OF RECOMBINANT DRUG-RESISTANT MYCOBACTERIUM BOVIS BACILLUSCALMETTE-GUERIN (BCG) STRAIN AND PHARMACEUTICAL COMPOSITION FOR TREATING TUBERCULOSIS (TB)” as detailed below:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220387575A1/en?oq=US2022%2f0387575+A1
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/ea/cd/a2/969099b29df334/US20220387575A1.pdf

The patent belongs to the fields of genetic engineering and new vaccine development and relates to a Mycobacterium bovis Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) strain and in particular to a construction method of a recombinant drug-resistant BCG strain and a pharmaceutical composition for treating tuberculosis (TB).
The disclosure/patent is intended to provide a vaccine that can shorten a treatment cycle and is effective against TB caused by drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis.