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With two million deaths a year, tuberculosis is one of the great threats to global health
With two million deaths a year, tuberculosis is one of the great threats to global health. Fighting it and developing treatments that eliminate the bacteria that causes it is the objective of ERA4TB, a research project made up of scientists from thirteen countries.
ERA4TB (European Regimen Accelerator for Tuberculosis) will be coordinated by the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) and directed by GlasoSmithKline Spain, with the scientific direction of the Pasteur Institute (France).
With a team of more than thirty public and private organizations and a budget of more than 200 million euros, ERA4TB is called to radically transform the way in which therapy is developed for the treatment of tuberculosis, an infectious disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which infects about ten million people worldwide each year.
Although the incidence of this infection is decreasing, its high capacity for drug resistance poses a threat to the safety of the world's population.
Standard tuberculosis therapy consists of a combination of three or four antibiotics - developed more than 60 years ago - in a six-month treatment, although if the infection is a resistant type, it can last up to two years.
"The appearance of these bacteria resistant to conventional treatments forces us to look for new drugs that, in combination with others that are in use, can combat the new strains," explain the researchers.
Drug development begins when a potentially effective drug is identified; Then the first clinical trials are carried out, which help to verify the safety and effectiveness of the compound and adapt its dosage.
The process costs between ten and twenty million and can take up to six years, so if a new treatment is developed in which four compounds are combined, the waiting time exceeds twenty years.
The ERA4TB project is committed to a parallel development path that allows for the simultaneous investigation of more than a dozen potentially effective molecules against tuberculosis, which will optimize costs and significantly reduce the development times of the new combined treatments necessary to eradicate this epidemic.
