Skip to Content

Study Suggests a Better TB Therapy

Triple-combo would be easier and faster than existing treatments and could fight drug-resistant strains.

A preliminary study suggests that a cocktail of three drugs could provide a quicker and better tolerated treatment for people infected with tuberculosis (TB) and could potentially work on difficult-to-treat forms of the disease that are resistant to other drugs. Unlike some existing TB treatments, the cocktail is thought to be compatible with HIV therapies, which would be an important improvement given that TB is the leading cause of death among people infected with HIV.

Researchers tested the ability of different compounds to treat tuberculosis patients recruited from clinics in Cape Town, South Africa. A combination of two existing TB drugs and one experimental compound seemed to work the best, reducing the amount of TB bacteria in patients by 99 percent in just two weeks, reports Nature News.

According to the World Health Organization, tuberculosis killed around 1.4 million people in 2010, and the vast majority of these deaths occurred in developing countries. 

The triple combo was only tested in 13 patients over 14 days; longer and larger trials will be needed to confirm the results.

For more of our coverage on tuberculosis, please read “Tuberculosis Drug Dosing Gets a Closer Look” and “Breakthrough in TB Diagnostics.”

Keep Reading

Most Popular

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.