WHO public consultation on draft Target Product Profiles for Tuberculosis Preventive Treatment
01 April 2020 – Tuberculosis (TB) is a major yet preventable global health problem, with an estimated 10 million new cases worldwide in 2018, resulting in more than 1.5 million deaths, making it the leading infectious disease cause of death worldwide. An estimated one-fourth of the world’s population is infected with the TB bacterium, of whom 5–10% advance to active TB disease in their lifetime.
Prevention of TB is a crucial component of the World Health
Organization (WHO) End TB Strategy that calls for 90% coverage
of TB preventive treatment (TPT) among persons living with HIV
(PLHIV) and household contacts of infectious TB cases by 2035.
The UN high-level meeting on TB, in September 2018, further
emphasized the need to strengthen the implementation of TPT and
called for 30 million people, including 4 million children <5
years of age, to receive TPT by 2022.
However, uptake
and scale-up of TPT have been slow, mainly due to the
limitations of both diagnostic assays and available regimens
(long duration, cost, toxicity, adherence issues, and
operational aspects), indicating the need for new short, safe,
efficacious and easy-to-take regimens for the treatment of TB
infection and prevention of TB disease. The WHO has developed
draft Target Product Profiles (TPPs) for TPT to align
developers’ performance and operational targets for new
TPT regimens with the needs of end-users.
The draft TPPs
are now available online for comment.
WHO invites
comments or feedback from all stakeholders by
27 April 2020, via this
link.
Based on the comments received on this draft, WHO
will prepare the final non-draft TPP (version 1.0), which will
be posted on WHO’s website and uploaded into the (WHO)
Product Profile Directory by October 2020.
Source:
WHO
