The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced Wednesday that it has awarded a $5 million grant to the Catalysis Foundation for Health, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating effective diagnostic measures in developing nations.
The research will focus on isolating new markers within the body that may signal a predisposition to tuberculosis and to developing more effective treatments for the disease. As it stands, researchers struggle to develop new treatments for the illness because it is difficult to measure a drug’s effectiveness due to the high cost and amount of time required to do so.
"The Catalysis Foundation’s initiative is an important opportunity to address a critical need in tuberculosis drug development and disease management by developing quantitative measures of bacterial burden," said Dr. Clifton E. Barry, a Catalysis collaborator on the new study. "Our goal is to provide new diagnostic tools to facilitate disease diagnosis, monitoring and treatment in remote geographic settings to help patients lead healthier lives free of the deadly disease caused by TB infection."
Catalysis, which was founded in 2007, has amassed a team of experts from fields including infectious disease research, global public health, government and non-governmental organizations and the pharmaceutical industry to work together.
"Our Foundation’s mission is to develop innovative diagnostic tools to accelerate the worldwide effort to eliminate deadly infectious diseases such as tuberculosis which are ravaging populations in developing countries," said Richard Thayer, chief executive, of Catalysis Foundation for Health.
Catalysis reports that 1.8 million worldwide died from tuberculosis in 2007; 456,000 of the deceased were HIV positive. Focusing the research on the developing world is especially crucial as 90 percent of all deaths from tuberculosis occur in third-world countries.
In 2008, there were nearly 13,000 reported cases of tuberculosis in the United States, which represented a 2.9 percent decrease in infections from the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Despite the importance of TB as a global public health problem, diagnosis and treatment of the disease still relies on highly inaccurate diagnostic procedures that are more than 100 years old. Currently, a diagnosis of TB most often relies on Acid Fast Bacillus (AFB) smear technology from multiple sputum samples, developed by Robert Koch in 1882. However, this test may not detect as many as 50% of TB cases, and it is not quick.
Use of culture technology is slow (taking 3-4 weeks or longer) and not readily available in large areas of the developing world. Additionally, its cost is generally prohibitive in most cases. Reliance on X-Ray technology is highly insensitive as the technology can’t differentiate TB from Cancer or other Pneumonias. Newer technologies are on the horizon, but they are both technologically demanding and expensive.
More recent efforts, including activities funded by the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation are focused on using antibodies that have been developed for use in a direct antigen detection assay. This will certainly help to further rapid diagnostic testing for TB here in the U.S. and around the globe.