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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
On TB patients (it is used to treat patients with drug-susceptible TB too). The side-effects are appalling. One drug sometimes causes patients to go permanently deaf.New TB drugs are being developed, but testing them has been extremely slow. For example, bedaquiline, a drug discovered by Tibotec over a decade ago, has still not been through a definitive clinical trial to show whether or not it is safe. The patent on this drug is now owned by Janssen Pharmaceuticals (both Tibotec and Janssen are subsidiaries of Johnson & Johnson) and it was accused last week by the Treatment Action Campaign of “unconscionably” delaying starting a trial.And while linezolid is promising, there has been only one very small randomised controlled trial of the drug; a mere 38 people on the trial actually took linezolid.There are two reasons for the slow pace of TB drug development. Pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to prioritise TB drug development: the vast majority of people sick with TB across the world are poor and there is little profit to be made from them. Also, the long period that the drugs need to be taken to eradicate the bacteria from a patient’s body — typically 18 to 24 months for drug-resistant TB — means that trials take a very long time to finish.Pharmaceutical companies do not prioritise TB drug development because most people sick with TB are poor.Pfizer has not conducted TB trials on linezolid. The trial described above was run by Korean scientists and partially funded by the United States National Institutes of Health. Nor has the company shown interest in doing so. Pfizer also has not taken any steps to get the drug approved for the treatment of TB by regulatory authorities. However, linezolid is increasingly being demanded for the treatment of TB. This is because a growing body of operational research, including MSF’s project, show that given the lack of available treatment options, it is worth trying.Pfizer failed to respond to requests for comment for this article.TB’s grim statisticsIn 2012, nearly nine million people contracted TB. About 1.3 million people are estimated to have died from the disease, of whom about 320,000 were HIV-positive.But progress is being made. The WHO estimates that TB mortality has declined 45% since 1990 and the rate of new cases has been falling for the last decade. However it is the spectre of drug-resistant TB that could reverse gains. Although 94,000 cases of drug-resistant TB were detected worldwide in 2012, the WHO believes this is only about a quarter of cases. And while more than 80% of detected cases received treatment, only about half were successfully treated. More cases of drug-resistant TB were detected in 2012 than in 2011, but
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