Tuberculosis, one of the world's biggest killers, is spreading globally and gaining in virulence as some strains are learning to evolve into almost bullet-proof bugs dubbed "XDR-TB."
The X stands for "extreme" and often translates into an incurable, deadly disease.
"We desperately need better and faster-acting drugs for TB," said Dr. Peter Small, head of the tuberculosis program at the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
To assist in this increasingly desperate endeavor, the Seattle philanthropy today announced that it has given $104 million to a non-profit, international organization called the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (or, more commonly, the TB Alliance).
"When we formed about five years ago, there was not a single TB drug in the (research and development) pipeline," said Maria Freire, president of the TB Alliance. The organization has offices in New York, Brussels and Cape Town, South Africa.
Today, partly due to the first $25 million the Gates Foundation donated in February 2000 to help launch the initiative, Freire said the group and its partners have two new TB drugs in clinical trials and nine other candidate drugs under development.
The new Gates grant, she said, will help bring one of the new antibiotic drugs called moxifloxacin through phase 2 studies and into the large-scale phase 3 clinical tests needed before it can be widely distributed. Made by Bayer Healthcare, this antibiotic could significantly reduce the treatment time required to cure patients, experts believe.
"One of the key problems with the treatment is simply the length of time it takes to work," said Dr. Jaime Bayona, director of Socios en Salud (Partners in Health), a TB-focused program in Peru affiliated with Harvard University and the world-renowned health advocate Dr. Paul Farmer.
"These drugs (in use today) are over 40 years old," said Bayona. A routine TB case, he noted, typically requires an infected person to swallow nearly a dozen pills a day for six to nine months.
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