A new consortium co-led by Weill Cornell Medicine has been awarded a five-year, $31 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to accelerate the development of faster, more effective treatment regimens for tuberculosis (TB).

Patients who have drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) have a similar microbiological response to bedaquiline-based second-line medications as patients with drug-sensitive TB taking first-line regimens, according to researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and GHESKIO in Haiti. Second-line medications are those that are given when one or more of the drugs given first for the disease are not effective. The research could have implications for shortening the duration of treatment for drug-resistant TB, which currently requires medications for up to 2 years, while those with drug-sensitive TB complete treatment in about 6 months. 

Weill Cornell Medicine researchers have identified a protein in Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) that contributes to drug tolerance, a phenomenon that allows bacteria to survive treatment with drugs that would normally kill them.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a wily old killer, one of the deadliest infectious diseases in history and one of the few that naturally infects only humans. Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have been pursuing treatments for tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) since the 1950s, and the program continues to excel at explaining TB’s mysteries and pushing toward more effective therapies.

Gut bacteria play an important role in the body’s response to treatment for tuberculosis (TB), according to researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Memorial Sloan Kettering. Because current treatments for TB involve long courses of antibiotics, which are known to disrupt the balance of microbes in the gut, a better understanding of these interactions may help in predicting outcomes to therapy and suggest ways to improve it.