Tuberculosis research: promising new active agent
A novel antibiotic
tuberculosis is the most common infectious disease worldwide. In the year 2022 alone, there were 10.6 million new infections and 1.3 million deaths. “We urgently need an effective new drug to fight tuberculosis, especially in view of the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant strains,” says Scientific Program Manager Dr. Julia Dreisbach, who, together with Professor Michael Hoelscher, Director of the Institute of infectious diseases and Tropical Medicine at LMU, is leading the development of new drugs against the dangerous disease.
The European-African network PanACEA – a consortium of tuberculosis researchers from five European and eleven African institutions – has carried out a study which reveals the promise of a novel antibiotic and published the results in the medical journal The Lancet Microbe. Co-developed by the Institute of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine, the active agent BTZ-043 could play a key role in the global fight against tuberculosis.
The researchers investigated the safety and tolerability of the product in 77 adults with newly diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis in Cape Town, South Africa. “The study demonstrates the antibacterial efficacy and tolerability of BTZ-043 and shows that it can be administered in combination with other tuberculosis drugs,” summarizes PD Dr. Norbert Heinrich, Senior Physician and Scientific Lead Tuberculosis.
Discovered by researchers at the Leibniz-HKI in Jena and developed in a collaboration between LMU University Hospital and Leibniz-HKI, the active agent suppresses an enzyme that tuberculosis pathogens need to build their cell walls, causing them to disintegrate and die.
PanACEA is one of the first adaptive model-based dose-finding studies for a tuberculosis drug and the first of its kind to be carried out in Africa. “The innovative design of the study, including evaluations of the food effects and the interactions between drugs, allows us to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the optimal administration of BTZ-043,” says Norbert Heinrich.
Original publication
Norbert Heinrich, Veronique de Jager, Julia Dreisbach, Petra Gross-Demel, Susanne Schultz, Sina Gerbach, Florian Kloss, Rodney Dawson, Kim Narunsky, ... Martin Peter Grobusch, Bruce Kirenga, Celso Khosa, Isabel Timana, Marriott Nliwasa, Madalo Mukoka; "Safety, bactericidal activity, and pharmacokinetics of the antituberculosis drug candidate BTZ-043 in South Africa (PanACEA-BTZ-043–02): an open-label, dose-expansion, randomised, controlled, phase 1b/2a trial"; The Lancet Microbe
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