New Delhi/Geneva, 20 April 2021 – Next week the Indian government is expected to decide whether it is willing to override patents on two critical tuberculosis (TB) drugs following a court petition filed at the Mumbai High Court by two survivors of TB and activists. If the government is willing to issue the ‘compulsory licenses,’ it would increase access to the newer TB drugs bedaquiline and delamanid for people with multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB in India. The international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) supports the court petition and urges the Indian government to take this critical step that would allow price-lowering competition among generic manufacturers for drug-resistant (DR) TB medicines in India.

Fixed-dose combination therapy reduces the weekly pill burden from nine to three for adults and prevents TB in those at highest risk of developing the disease.

The World Health Organization (WHO) released the sixth edition of the Guidance for the surveillance of drug resistance in tuberculosis aiming to assist national TB programs in developing the strongest possible mechanisms of surveillance for drug resistance in TB, building on more than 25 years of global experience.

Helsinki, Finland, 19 April 2021: Valo Therapeutics Limited (Valo Tx), the developer of novel, adaptable immunotherapy platforms for cancer and infectious diseases, today announced the acquisition of intellectual property rights for the proprietary ‘PeptiBAC’ technology from the University of Helsinki, Finland.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is convening a Guideline Development Group (GDG) to advise on updates needed to its recommendations on the treatment of drug susceptible tuberculosis (TB).

Mireia Coscollá, a researcher at the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio), a joint centre of the University of Valencia and the Spanish National Research Council, has led a study on the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, one of the 10 deadliest diseases in the world, which proves the existence of a new lineage. After analysing 675 African genomes in an article published in the journal Microbial Genomics, he concludes that the new lineage, named L9, is located mainly in the eastern part of the continent.

On 22 April 2021, the TB Europe Coalition in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe, invites civil society and TB-affected community from Eastern Europe and Central Asia countries to join a capacity building online event 'Exploring practical opportunities for civil society and TB-affected community through WHO National TB Program reviews to improve collaboration and accountability'.

NEW YORK (April 15, 2021) — The 2020 G-Finder Report, released today, shows that low funding levels are putting life-saving science—and especially the most vulnerable—at risk. Global investments in tuberculosis (TB) research and development (R&D) funding totaled of $670 million in 2019. This is far short of the estimated $2.16 billion that the Stop TB Partnership estimates is needed annually to develop and deliver new tools that can end the TB pandemic, which causes illness in 10 million people each year. These tools include effective vaccines, diagnostics and drug regimens.

- Tuberculosis is one of the leading causes of death from a single infectious agent in the world, but the nutrients that the pathogen uses to survive in the body is poorly understood
- The bacteria that cause tuberculosis need a sugar called trehalose to survive and cause infection
- The molecular basis of how Mycobacterium tuberculosis uses and transports trehalose has been discovered by researchers from the University of Warwick
- This ignites new opportunities to develop new drugs and diagnostics targeted against TB

JAKARTA, 14 April 2021 – Germany, Indonesia, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria today signed a new agreement that will increase support to tuberculosis programs in Indonesia. That will be achieved by converting €50 million of debt owed by Indonesia to Germany into investments in public health programs supported by the Global Fund in Indonesia.