Critical Path Institute Receives Third Grant to Accelerate Tuberculosis Diagnostics

“To create the kinds of tests essential to the effective deployment of novel tuberculosis treatments”

The database will inform correlations between mutations and clinically relevant resistance. This will advance the development of rapid drug susceptibility tests for tuberculosis that can be used to speed up the selection of effective treatment. The longer-term vision of the database is to directly enable sequencing data interpretation and patient care.

“To create the kinds of tests essential to the effective deployment of novel tuberculosis treatments,” explains Martha Brumfield, Ph.D., President and CEO of C-Path, “we need a singular data resource that encompasses global resistance trends and markers for resistance that come directly from patients with tuberculosis and their caregivers.”

C-Path’s Critical Path to Drug TB Regimens (CPTR) program will partner with FIND, New Diagnostics Working Group (NDWG), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to compile the international tuberculosis data relevant to developing the ability to very rapidly diagnose the specific type of resistant TB present in a patient, and in turn, help define the most effective TB treatment regimen for each patient.

“There are a great many different strains of tuberculosis, and diagnosing the specific strain and developing a treatment regimen is currently a time-consuming undertaking,” says Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Programme. “With this global partnership in place, a great need is being addressed by putting existing data from around the world to work in developing the fastest and best diagnostic tools to help the patients suffering from the scourge of tuberculosis – which remains an urgent public health threat that kills 1.5 million people each year.”