Mike Frick, TAG TB Project Co-Director, delivered comments as a civil society representative at the WHO Director-General’s TB Vaccine Accelerator Council meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. 

Mike Frick's plenary talk delivered at TB2016 Durban, South Africa, July 16, 2016.

As the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation realigns its TB vaccine strategy to focus on early-stage candidate development, equitable access priorities must also be established before large-scale trials are conducted.

Confirming the efficacy and safety of bedaquiline-inclusive regimens is a priority. Comparing them to unvalidated MDR-TB drug combinations in the planned STREAM study is not the way to go about it.

Each year since 2006, TAG has tracked spending on research and development (R&D) for new diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines to improve TB treatment and prevention. The 2013 Report on Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends: 2005–2012 presents eight years of funding data. It also compares current spending in six research areas to the corresponding R&D funding targets outlined in the Stop TB Partnership’s Global Plan to Stop TB, 2011–2015. For the first time, TAG also analyzed investments in pediatric TB R&D. The report finds that after seven years of slow and unsteady increases in funding, TB R&D investors reported a drop in spending in 2012 that threatens to undermine the tenuous gains made since 2005.

In the first of two linked posts, Mike Frick of Treatment Action Group (TAG) and Audrey Zhang of Harvard College argue that patient-centered approaches in treatment for drug-resistant and drug-sensitive tuberculosis are needed.