New TB drug could shorten treatment time: Study

In a breakthrough for tuberculosis patients all over the world, a new experimental antibiotic for curing tuberculosis may be more than isoniazid, a decades-old drug which is currently one of the standard treatments for the disease, a study claims. According to the study that’s published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, the mouse models showed the drug with a much lower tendency to develop resistance.
."The goal of TB drug development programmes is to develop universal treatment regimens that will shorten and simplify TB treatment in patients, which typically takes at least six months, and sometimes more than a year," said Gregory T Robertson, an assistant professor at Colorado State University in the US.
In the study, the researchers used a new TB mouse model that develops these M tuberculosis-containing granulomas to compare isoniazid and AN12855."We discovered that the drugs differed dramatically with respect to their abilities to kill the pathogen in highly diseased tissues. AN12855 proved more effective, without selecting for appreciable drug resistance," said Robertson.
"Our studies also further validate the use of a new TB mouse efficacy model (dubbed C3HeB/FeJ) as a research tool to study the impact of heightened human-like disease states on the activity and distribution of TB antibiotics that are in various stages of development," said Robertson. That could accelerate the development of better TB treatments, researchers said