Medication
An experimental drug that starves the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis makes conventional therapy five times more effective against drug-resistant TB, doctors reported on Wednesday.
The company-run study found that the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) drug TMC207, if added to a standard cocktail of five other TB medicines, cleared traces of the tuberculosis bacteria in the sputum of 48 percent of the volunteers after eight weeks. Only 9 percent of patients given the five older drugs alone showed that type of improvement.
TMC207 is being billed as the first new tuberculosis drug in 40 years. It works by interfering with the enzyme ATP synthase, which the bacteria need to store energy.
"It starves them. It's like cutting off your food supply," Dr. David McNeeley of Tibotec Inc., the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that developed the drug, said in a telephone interview. Other drugs attack TB in different ways.
The only notable side effect was nausea, experienced by 26 percent of volunteers in the TMC207 group, versus 4 percent among those getting the conventional cocktail plus a placebo, they reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The test involved 47 people in South Africa with newly diagnosed lung TB that was resistant to two standard drugs, isoniazid and rifampin.
About 1.8 million people die worldwide each year from tuberculosis and a third of the world's population -- 2 billion people -- are infected, according to the World Health Organization.
The WHO says that of 9 million new TB cases annually, about 490,000 are multiple-drug resistant TB or MDR-TB and about 40,000 are extensively drug resistant or XDR-TB.
Doug
CDIstaffing.com