Tuberculosis (TB) remains a leading cause of infection-related mortality worldwide, with an estimated 10.7 million incident cases and 1.23 million deaths recorded in 2024.1 The Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine (BCG), despite over a century of use, provides unreliable protection against pulmonary disease in adolescents and adults, and the identification of antigens capable of inducing durable protective immunity in these populations remains an unsolved challenge. Against this backdrop, the emergence of plasmid DNA as a vaccine platform in the mid-1990s generated considerable scientific optimism.