Introduction: Tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), is presently the most deadly infectious disease worldwide. Standard TB therapy is lengthy (typically 6 months) and has very unpleasant side effects. Poor adherence to the therapy can result in the development of drug resistant forms of the disease. Patients infected with multi-drug resistant (MDR) or extensively drug resistant (XDR) strains must undergo treatments that are even longer (up to 24 months) and associated with severe side effects.
Even after such prolonged and onerous therapies, only 30–50% of patients have positive treatment outcomes. New treatments are urgently needed to shorten the duration of the standard treatment and for MDR and XDR-TB therapy. Traditionally, the discovery of new antibacterial therapies has focused on finding new compounds having novel targets. This extremely expensive and…
