Pharmacometrics to advance novel regimens for drug-resistant tuberculosis

For the first time in more than 50 years, there are new drugs to treat tuberculosis (TB), a disease that affects more than 10 million people each year. These new drugs may be particularly important for treatment of drug-resistant TB that doesn’t respond to standard, six-month oral treatment. More than half a million people get this form of TB each year. The treatment available is weak and toxic, it lasts up to two years including about eight months of daily injections and only about half of people who get treated get better.

PandrTB takes advantage of the endTB trial, a trial of new all-oral regimens. In patients who take part in the endTB trial, we will measure how much of each TB drug is in the blood and estimate how much is necessary for successful treatment and how much is present in people who have side effects.

PandrTB will use this information to predict the amount of each drug, and which drugs, patients should receive to have the highest chance of cure and the lowest chance of developing side effects.