Almost half of the nearly 10 million patients with active tuberculosis each year could potentially be cured with significantly shorter treatments than current guidelines recommend, a new analysis from UC San Francisco has found. The results suggest targeted therapies could be more effective in treating TB, which killed an estimated 1.3 million people around the world last year. The new study, published in Nature Medicine , re-analyzed data from three pivotal TB trials that had failed to show the efficacy of four-month treatments over the standard six-month treatment duration.
The new analysis was led by a graduate student in the Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics program at UCSF, with publicly available data from the Platform for Aggregation of Clinical TB Studies. The UCSF scientists said the reason the earlier trials failed was because they treated all patients the same,…
