Tuberculosis (TB) poses a serious threat to public health worldwide; in 2018 alone, an estimated 10 million people fell ill with the disease and 1.6 million died. The goal of the ERA4TB project is to accelerate the development of a new, more efficient treatment regimen that will help the world to meet the United Nations goal of ending the TB epidemic by 2030.
Today, standard TB treatment consists of a regimen of four drugs and lasts at least six months; for people with drug-resistant TB, treatment lasts even longer. New drugs are added to regimens one by one, meaning that building a new, faster and safer treatment regimen takes a very long time.
ERA4TB plans to drop the sequential approach and instead adopt a parallel pathway, which will allow the project to investigate the safety and efficacy of combinations of over a dozen drug candidates at the same time. By using a standardised approach and studying multiple molecules in parallel, the project hopes to optimise and speed up the development of new drug regimens needed to stop TB in its tracks.
The project will achieve this by creating a world-class ‘platform’ that brings together the expertise, tools and resources needed to accelerate the development of anti-TB drug combinations. The hope is that the platform will continue to operate beyond the end of the project.
ERA4TB is part of the AMR Accelerator programme.