Welcome to the Working Group on New TB Drugs Blog
The Week in TB R&D – March 9, 2010
The WGND blog is in the R&D vanguard! Recently, Nick Be wrote a post highlighting the activation of the cellular ‘self-eating’ mechanism known as autophagy in the elimination of TB from an infected individual. On March 5, 2010, Cell published a paper by Kumar and colleagues, which further supports the hypothesis that M. tb [...]
Hans Rosling Details the Lack of TB News Coverage
Compared to the widespread news coverage during the swine flu outbreak, TB receives little coverage, especially when you calculate the ratio of news hits to mortality. During a 13 day period in April and May of 2009, the WHO confirmed 31 deaths from swine flu. In that same period, the WHO shows approximately 60,000 deaths from tuberculosis. Prof. Hans Rosling tracked news coverage of each disease using Google news search and found that swine flu was being hyped to a tremendous degree relative to the mortality figures while TB was practically being ignored.
Ethionamide: A “new” first-line drug for Tuberculosis?
Developing new TB drugs is inhibited by so many factors – namely:
The flow through the TB drug pipeline is slow at best. Despite decades of hard work, we still use the demanding regimen developed 50 years ago – a regimen that requires patients to undergo 6-9 months of treatment consisting of four first-line TB [...]
Screening Campaigns for Tuberculosis
Drug discovery teams around the world have been actively selecting targets that are likely to be important in killing dormant or very slowly replicating tuberculosis in an effort to shorten the time to cure; for drug sensitive TB, six to nine months treatment time and drug resistant TB, up to two years treatment time. Some of these [...]
This week in TB R&D – March 2, 2010
This week we highlight two recent papers in TB R&D – TB and HIV treatment and PA-824.
Tuberculosis is the leading cause of the death in HIV positive individuals in the developing world. Major challenges exist in treating both diseases simultaneously as drug-drug interactions are common between the first-line of TB regimen and antiretroviral therapy (ART). [...]
MDR-TB patients face discrimination, long road to recovery in Peru
Video: Patients who develop multi-drug resistant tuberculosis face an arduous course of medical treatment. What’s worse, many say, is being ostracized by friends and neighbors who fear the dreaded disease.
Aren’t These Lives Worth Saving, Too?
In recent weeks, U.S.-based global health advocates have been scrutinizing and providing public comments on the recently released draft strategy of the President’s Global Health Initiative (GHI), which rightly expands the US government’s global health policy to address several key areas that were neglected in recent years. However, although tuberculosis kills almost two million people each year, the GHI – more accurately, what’s not in the GHI – suggests that TB is just not a priority for the Administration.
Jacques Grosset Interview
Since the beginning of my professional life I have been involved in research to improve the control of tuberculosis, mainly by improving treatment of tuberculosis and preventing the development of drug resistance.
This Week in TB R&D- 22 Feb 2010
A few recent reports track the progress being made by the Stop TB Partnership and TB research funding trends from 2005-2008. As global TB efforts increase in the areas of research, drug, vaccine and diagnostics development, greater emphasis has been placed upon funding.
Interview with Pere Joan Cardona
For 15 years, Dr. Cardona has focused his studies on infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) has developed a hypothesis and dynamics of tuberculosis infection, which could explain why the Koch bacillus persists in the human body as implies a continuous reinfection of tissues. This may open the field to new health tools that provide an adequate response to the challenges of this ancient disease that kills 1.8 million people each year.
Toppix TB News- Baby given ten times dose of vaccine 9 Mar 2010
- Health officials ready for TB uptick 8 Mar 2010
- CDC Urges Increased Awareness of Liver Injury During Isoniazid Therapy 6 Mar 2010
- Tuberculosis Exposure at SDSU 4 Mar 2010
- Genetic variation in carboxylesterase genes and susceptibility to isoniazid-induced hepatotoxicity 2 Mar 2010
