TB is a global public health crisis. A total of 1.8 million people died of TB in 2015. Drug-resistant forms of TB (DR-TB) are particularly hard to cure, involving ineffective, long, toxic, complex and expensive treatment regimens. According to WHO in 2015, only 20% of the 580,000 patients eligible for a MDR-TB treatment effectively received it and of those treated only 52% are cured (data: 2013).
A typical form of TB requires a six-month treatment regimen made up of four different antibiotic drugs.
But increasingly, this standard regimen isn’t working: the drugs are not effective against resistant forms of TB. According to WHO estimates there are half a million new cases of MDR-TB each year, and one person infected with MDR-TB is likely to infect a further 10-15 people in a single year.
As well as not being very effective, the current treatments for patients with Multi-Drug resistant forms of TB (MDR / XDR-TB) are extremely difficult for patients to endure. In most cases, patients face a minimum of nine months of treatment, usually closer to two years, during which they must swallow more than 10,000 pills in addition to six to eight months of painful injections. Debilitating side effects range from nausea, joint pains and gastro-intestinal problems to irreversible deafness and psychosis.