New tuberculosis therapy could be more potent than current treatments

Taking a new approach toward tuberculosis therapy, a UCLA-led research team has devised a potential drug regimen that could cut the treatment time by up to 75 percent, while simultaneously reducing the risk that patients could develop drug-resistant TB.To identify the regimen, the researchers launched a systematic search for an optimal drug treatment using the Parabolic Response Surface Platform, a data analysis method that identifies which drug combinations work synergistically — that is, with individual drugs working together in a way that is more potent than the sum of their individual potencies. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications, is the first to use the platform to identify more effective TB drug regimens and one of the first to focus on a communicable disease.TB is one of the world ’s deadliest diseases, killing more people than any other disease caused by a single infectious organism. Worldwide, about 10 million people develop active TB each year and about 1.5 million people die of the disease, with India, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa accounting for 60 percent of the total, according to theWorld Health Organization.  The United States saw 9,557 cases in 2015 and, according to the most recent data available, 493 deaths from the disease in 2014. More than 2 billion people have latent infections of the disease-causing bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, meaning they could ultimately develop active dise...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news