Transgene SA announced that it has been granted a sub-award from Emergent BioSolutions Inc. under its existing grant of approximately $5 million from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)1. The funding will be used to advance Transgene’s tuberculosis (TB) immunotherapy program.

Simultaneous treatment with anti-tuberculosis (TB) drugs and antiretroviral therapy (ART) does not result in major changes in liver function, investigators report in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The world is facing a stealthy and alarming increase in drug resistant tuberculosis, the World Health Organization (WHO) indicated in its yearly global TB report, released last week. While the 2012 incidence of TB continued its slow, steady decline from prior years, there were an estimated 450,000 new cases of multiple drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) in 2012, according to the Global Tuberculosis Report 2013. Worse, fewer than 25 percent of people suspected of having MDR-TB were identified last year and 16,000 people diagnosed with the disease were not put on treatment, the international health organization said. Treatment waiting lists are continuing to grow, it added.

The first phase of a landmark study of complications of tuberculosis (TB) – the first ever carried out in Africa - has been completed by researchers at UHSM and the University of Manchester working with colleagues in Uganda. They believe that their results have important implications for better understanding a disease that kills three people every minute and affects 8.7 million worldwide annually.

"2013 has been a year of tremendous progress. I am optimistic that paediatric TB will no longer be 'the neglected of the neglected'. With help of UNITAID and US Agency for International Development (USAID) we are embarking on significant changes in this direction” said Dr Melvin Spigelman, President and CEO of Global Alliance of TB Drug Development (TB Alliance). He was addressing the TB Alliance Stakeholders’ Association Annual meeting before the 44th Union World Conference on Lung Health opens in Paris later this week.

Confronting a slowing economy and a large budget deficit, India has significantly reduced its planned expenditure on fighting tuberculosis, the airborne disease that kills more adults here than any other infection and has become increasingly more drug resistant, a review of government plans and budgets shows.

Tuberculosis was present in Europe as early as 7000 years ago, according to new research published October 30th in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, by Muriel Masson and colleagues at the University of Szeged.

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.

London — A new, sophisticated diagnostic test for tuberculosis now being rolled out promises to be faster and more accurate than the old methods and much easier to use. But the first trials of the GeneXpert MTB/RIF Assay test in real-life situations have proved that while all this is true, it did not make any significant difference to treatment outcomes.