Tuberculosis Treatments Are Getting Easier… and Faster

Following a clinical trial, the World Health Organization (WHO) is recommending three new all-oral regimens for a particularly difficult form of tuberculosis. These regimens would cure patients in a shorter amount of time and in a less painful way.

“After several decades of therapeutic status quo, new treatments evaluated by independent actors have been rapidly incorporated by the WHO into its recommendations for combating the scourge of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis”, explains Lorenzo Guglielmetti, MD, PhD, Médecins Sans Frontières Director for the endTB project and Co-Principal Investigator of the clinical trial.

A consortium of organizations – Partners In Health, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Interactive Research and Development – conducted the endTB clinical trial for multidrug- or rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis (MDR/RR-TB) in seven countries between 2017 and 2023. All three WHO-recommended new regimens cure patients in 9 months through all-oral treatments. The comparator healed patients in 18 months with treatments that could include daily painful injections. Evidence supports new recommendations for programmatic use of novel, shortened regimens “in many population groups, including children, adolescents, pregnant and breastfeeding women”.