$30 Million Awarded to Enhance Tuberculosis Treatments

The New York-based TB Alliance announced on January 20, 2022, that it had received funding up to $30 million over five years from the United States Agency for International Development to jumpstart the search for new tuberculosis (TB) treatments and optimize existing ones.

The very old BCG vaccine continues to be deployed by most countries to help prevent TB.

In 2020, more than 40% of the estimated 9.9 million people who fell ill from TB were neither diagnosed nor treated.

According to the WHO, an estimated 1.5 million people died of TB in 2020.

"While the world was focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, the TB pandemic tightened its grip on the most impoverished parts of the world," said Mel Spigelman, M.D., President and CEO of TB Alliance in a press statement.

"This is the danger we face in letting older diseases linger instead of eradicating them."

TB Alliance's work in drug development is focused on finding new drug candidates and then testing new treatment regimens that include these candidates instead of shepherding individual drug candidates one by one through the lengthy clinical trial process.

TB Alliance will continue developing new formulations of TB treatments appropriate for children who require different dosing than adults. 

In 2010, the WHO established new dosage guidelines for children for the standard drug-sensitive TB regimen, but no new medicines were manufactured according to the new guidelines until TB Alliance and its pharmaceutical partners produced child-friendly doses in 2015.

The most drug-sensitive forms of TB require at least four months of treatment using four anti-TB drugs. 

As of January 22, 2022, there are multiple versions of the existing BCG vaccine available as a generic, with newer versions conducting clinical studies.