New Paper Shows Path to Shorten, Innovate Tuberculosis Treatment

Hackensack Meridian Health’s CDI-led paper suggests tailoring TB treatment to disease severity could improve patient outcomes and help prevent spread of drug-resistant strains.

A new article published in Nature offers a promising path toward shorter, more effective treatment for tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial disease that affects millions worldwide.

Veronique Dartois, Ph.D., a member of the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), authored the publication entitled, “Strategies for Shortening Tuberculosis Treatment”–with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation–which shares a vision to personalize TB treatment for better patient care and more expedient curative outcomes.

Currently, TB treatment requires patients to take multiple drugs for six months or longer, a challenging regimen that can lead to patients stopping treatment early, contributing to treatment failure and the spread of drug-resistant TB.

Researchers seek to innovate TB treatment through triage of case severity in individual patients.

“Clinical TB is heterogeneous,” said Dartois, “meaning it presents differently in different patients with their own bodies responding differently to infection from Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb).”

Dartois and her team suggest that by using new diagnostic tools to properly identify patients with less severe forms of TB, treatment courses could be safely shortened. By then making the important distinction between “easy-to-treat” and “hard-to-treat” TB, the study finds that patients with more severe disease can more efficiently be provided longer, more resource-intense treatment required to avoid relapse.

This patient-centric, process-driven approach could improve patient outcomes, reduce the development of drug resistance, and alleviate the burden on healthcare systems, according to Dartois and her co-authors, including those from the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

"Integrating novel diagnostic tools with targeted therapies to develop a precision medicine approach for tuberculosis patients offers significant promise for enhancing treatment efficacy and clinical outcomes" said David Perlin, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of the CDI.

This research builds on previous publications by Dartois at CDI and takes a significant step toward a future where TB treatment is more patient-centered. By optimizing treatment strategies, scientists hope to accelerate progress in the global fight against TB and improve the lives of those affected by this devastating disease.

“I’m grateful for the support of Dr. Perlin and the great research faculty here at CDI,” said Dartois. “With input from all our colleagues and from Tuberculosis Drug Accelerator (TBDA), this was truly a global team effort.”