Impact on TB: Partnerships joining forces to combat TB

There is an urgent need for novel tuberculosis treatments that can defeat emerging strains of drug-resistant TB.

Existing TB treatments needed to defeat the disease cause unpleasant side effects (e.g. nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, depression, weight loss) and need to be taken for several months, so people must endure these side effects for long periods of time.

What’s more, up until now the backbone of treatments against TB has been bedaquiline in combination with other molecules. But increasingly, patients that are being treated with bedaquiline find that it is less effective, as the TB bacteria is evolving and developing resistance to the drug. Alternative approaches to tackling TB are needed.

Three EU-funded projects - TRIC-TB, bETo-TB and UNITE4TB, have fuelled the development of a new anti-TB therapy, which can be used in combination with ethionamide - an agent used to treat tuberculosis where others have failed - to treat TB.

This alpibectir/ethionamide combination treatment could prove especially effective against multi-drug resistant TB.

In addition, patients taking the combination treatment will suffer fewer side effects. The side effects and length of treatment associated with TB therapies have also led to poor patient adherence to treatment in the past which in turn has contributed to the evolution of drug resistant TB. New therapies with fewer side effects could improve patient adherence to treatment as well as slowing down the evolution of resistance.

TRIC-TB and UNITE4TB are IMI2 projects, whereas bETo-TB was funded under a public-public partnership for global health, EDCTP-2.

Join us on December 9 and find out how this molecule was developed and trialled within these collaborative projects, boosting health resilience and adding one more weapon to the global arsenal of drugs against antimicrobial resistant infections.