Albany Times Union Examines Research Aimed at Shortening Length of TB Treatment
The Albany Times Union on Thursday examined the Ordway Research Institute's efforts to decrease the amount of time it takes to complete tuberculosis treatment regimens. Ordway Co-Director George Drusano and colleague Arnold Louie last year were awarded a two-year, $1.7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is funding a number of research projects aimed at developing improved TB treatments. "The idea here is we don't know as much as we need to know about how to give TB drugs," Drusano said.
Louie said that the Gates Foundation's goal of reducing TB treatment duration from six months to two weeks could eliminate worries "about patient noncompliance (in taking the drugs) and the emergence of resistant strains." Drusano and Louie's work focuses on identifying the hardest-to-kill TB strains, isolating those strains and then treating them with a combination of drugs to determine which are the most effective. According to the Times Union, the researchers are collaborating with a laboratory operated by London-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca International in Bangalore, India. They will work with the lab to test drug therapies on mice, and the candidates eventually will enter human trials. The researchers currently are focusing on existing drugs and looking at ways to optimize therapies and shorten treatment times. Ordway will be considered for another round of funding after two years. The Ordway grant is part of $280 million in Gates Foundation funding, which also includes developing improved TB diagnostics and new TB vaccines. The Gates Foundation has pledged to spend $900 million on TB by 2015 (Anderson, Albany Times Union, 1/17).