U.S. researchers have used machine learning to predict the effectiveness of multi-drug treatment combinations for tuberculosis (TB), which could help in the design of new therapy regimens. By examining study data from TB drug pairs in vitro, they were able to predict how three or four drugs could affect treatment…

A new preclinical study reports the discovery of a new class of drug candidates that show promise for treating drug-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in rats. Senior author of the study, published in the journal PLOS Biology, Ho-Yeon Song, PhD, of Soonchunhyang University in South Korea said, “The new class…

The Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine against tuberculosis (TB) can protect newborn babies against infections other than TB through changes to lipids and metabolites related to the immune system, shows research led by Harvard Medical School. The BCG vaccination has been available for 100 years and while its efficacy at preventing…

Two strains of the bacterium causing tuberculosis (TB), one of the world’s most common diseases, have only minor genetic differences but attack the lungs in a very different fashion. A new study from Rutgers researchers about this could explain why treatments work in some patients but not others. It could…

Key genetic changes that are behind the lung damage seen in tuberculosis patients as well as a potential candidate treatment to exploit these genetic targets have been identified by researchers. The two new studies cast light on disease processes in tuberculosis (TB)and are reported in two papers in the Journal of…

Scientists at University College London (UCL) have found that testing for gene expression biomarkers in blood could predict the onset of active tuberculosis (TB) disease three to six months before symptoms develop. The researchers’ studies indicated that eight different transcript signatures, regulated by interferon signaling, demonstrated equal accuracy for diagnosing…

While infections from Mycobacterium tuberculosis are relatively rare in the U.S., the microbe is still a leading cause of death worldwide. Moreover, the odds of encountering the microbe in the U.S. are so low, in fact, that risk factors for the disease can easily go unnoticed—if you happened to carry…

Initially labeled by the ancient Greeks as phthisis, which translated into meaning consumption, tuberculosis was recognized in antiquity as to seemingly consume the afflicted, as their weight dropped drastically during disease progression. Today, tuberculosis (TB) still affects almost one-third of the world’s population and remains a leading cause of death…

Over the last thirty years, protein-based injections and DNA therapeutics accounted for the majority of newly introduced treatments. However, these medicines remain out of reach for many around the world due to high pricing, with some therapies ranging from thousands to several millions of dollars to purchase. [caption id=”attachment_147257″ align=”alignright”…

The results of two back-to-back randomized double-blind placebo controlled trials has shown that a 100-year-old vaccine originally developed to prevent tuberculosis helps protect people with type 1 diabetes from COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The research by investigators at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) found that the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)…

A team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame, Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Institutes of Health has now devised a host-directed therapy (HDT) approach to targeting TB, which utilizes the anticancer drug bevacizumab in combination with the hypertension therapy, losartan, to improve blood flow within granulomas and…

Researchers have created a genome-wide metabolic model of the bacterium responsible for Lyme disease, which could help create more bespoke treatments and avoid the need for broad-spectrum antibiotics. The computational “subway map” of Borrelia burgdorferi makes it possible to identify potential drug targets and existing treatments that act only upon…

COVID-19 is still a public health challenge. New variants are emerging and hospitalizations are rising for the first time in several months. As a result, countries are scrambling to prepare in case the pandemic roars back. To support global monitoring and control, the World Health Organization (WHO) has published a…

A novel test that shapes pathogen nucleic acid into nanoballs could provide a cheap, sensitive way to detect such infections without the need for laboratory analysis, making it particularly useful for low-resource settings. The self-assembling nanoballs pass through a simple electrical detection system, where they disrupt the current to identify…

Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Wednesday they will provide a combined $550 million to fund a Phase III clinical trial of the tuberculosis (TB) candidate M72/AS01E (M72). If proven effective in the clinical trial, M72 could become the first new vaccine in more than 100 years…