TB Project moves ahead amidst Concerns of Negative Impact Effects from Pandemic

Speaking ahead of World TB Day held on March 24, Dr Laura Cleghorn from the University of Dundee’s Drug Discovery Unit (DDU), who heads up a multi-million dollar effort to find new treatments for tuberculosis, malaria and future viral pandemic diseases, warned that the Covid-19 pandemic may lead to a rise in TB infections globally.

With a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the DDU has undertaken a 3 year project primarily focused on accelerating the delivery of drug candidates for TB.  The project will build on previous studies into TB aiming to identify safe, orally dosed molecules with the potential to significantly reduce the duration of drug therapy that currently lasts for six months or more and is very onerous for the patient

Despite often being seen as a historic disease in the West, TB remains a major global cause of both mortality and financial burden, being responsible for 1.5 million deaths in 2020 with an estimated 10 million people being infected per year. 

Dr Cleghorn, Portfolio Manager for TB drug discovery at Dundee, said that extensive efforts over many years to reducing the global disease burden, could be impacted negatively by the pandemic, primarily due to reduced access to TB diagnosis and treatment centres, leading to “more patients going undiagnosed and subsequently transmitting the disease within their communities.”

“It will be a few years before the full effect of the pandemic on TB disease burden will be known but there was already an ongoing need for new improved TB therapeutics. All the front-line drugs currently in use were identified before the 1960s and all have increasing amounts of clinical drug resistance, so novel therapies are urgently required to tackle the disease.

“With the potential increase in cases due to the pandemic there is an even more pressing need for new therapeutics to address what will likely be a clear increase in TB burden and deaths once the Covid-19 pandemic is curtailed. 

“When I talk to people about my research, they are surprised that I work on TB because they think of it as a disease of yesteryear because it is not something that is prevalent in the UK and other western countries. This is still a major issue in low- and middle-income countries, so there is still a need to develop new and improved TB treatments.”

The DDU is a member of the Tuberculosis Drug Accelerator (TBDA); the European Regime Accelerator for Tuberculosis (ERA4TB and an Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) funded consortium aiming to accelerate new treatment regimens for tuberculosis.

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