It is now possible to predict how well tuberculosis (TB) responds to drug treatment, according to a new study at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. Dr Simon Waddell, working with a team of researchers from the UK, South Africa and Finland, has discovered bacterial biomarkers that predict early treatment success. This may allow patients to finish drug therapy early, reducing the difficult and debilitating side-effects of the drugs and cutting treatment costs.
There were nine million new cases and 1.5 million deaths from TB in 2013, and there are around 6000 cases in the UK annually. The standard drug therapy is a combination of four drugs taken over six months. Side-effects can be severe, and it can be difficult for patients to stay on treatment for the duration of therapy, leading to ineffective treatment and the emergence of drug-resistant TB.
Dr Waddell and collaborators mapped the responses of TB bacteria during standard drug therapy to understand why some bacteria survive through months of drug treatment. The study showed that by testing patients’ sputum, specific changes could be identified in the TB bacteria two weeks after starting drug therapy that could predict the success of treatment six weeks later.
The study was published in the journal BMC Medicine (Honeyborne I, McHugh TD, Kuittinen I et al. Profiling persistent tubercule bacilli from patient sputa during therapy predicts early drug efficacy. BMC Med 2016; 14 [1]: 68).