Backed by a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, researchers from the University of Dundee will push the LEADS4TB program to find new treatment options over the next three years.
“We want to improve how we do drug discovery for TB, and identify new candidate drugs to treat the disease,” Paul Wyatt, professor at Dundee’s School of Life Sciences and team lead, said. “Tuberculosis has proved a difficult disease to treat for many reasons. The body responds to infection by encasing TB in the lungs into lesions, which are difficult for drugs to penetrate. Inside the lesions, TB enters into a dormant state that is very hard to kill. Even once the drug reaches the bacteria, it has a complex cell wall, which is difficult for medicines to pass through. Once inside the cell, TB can break down a drug, rendering it useless.”
Current treatments for TB can take up to six months to cure patients. Such a long recovery time also proves too much for many people can manage, leading them to cease treatment before completion. The result tends to be increased disease transmission, growing drug resistance, and even death. The disease is particularly dangerous in low and middle-income countries.
According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.5 million people died from TB and 10 million people were afflicted in 2018.
“Building on our experience, our goal is to find new ways of killing TB that could lead to the development of new drugs. With this support, we hope we can make a significant breakthrough.”