DENVER—Colorado State University landed $3.7 million in grants for tuberculosis research on Tuesday, part of $280 million effort by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to speed the development of new drugs to treat TB.
One of the grants, for $2.6 million, will be used to better understand how tuberculosis bacteria grows inside the body so researchers can better simulate those conditions in the laboratory to test drugs, CSU professor John Belisle said.
He said that could help avoid lengthy tests on people by weeding out ineffective drugs in the lab.
“It would limit the number of drugs we have to screen,” Belisle said.
A second grant, for $1.1 million, will be used to review the range of tests used on potential tuberculosis drugs and reach a consensus among the world’s 20 TB drug research centers on which tests are the most effective.
Belisle said working under the same procedures will prevent researchers from getting different test results on different drugs, help them more quickly rule out drugs that aren’t promising and help them share research results.
The lack of standardized lab procedures surfaced during the case of Andrew Speaker, the Atlanta lawyer who caused an international health scare after traveling home from Europe with a drug-resistant strain.
Tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that he had extremely drug-resistant TB, prompting officials to issue a rare federal quarantine order. Later tests at Denver’s National Jewish Medical and Research Center, where Speaker was treated, showed he instead had a multi-drug-resistant strain that could be treated by some drugs.
The CSU research will focus on standardizing drug-testing procedures, but the results could someday also be used to help improve methods for diagnosing TB strains, Belisle said.
He said the aim of the research is to pave the way for new drugs to treat resistant strains as well as drugs that can treat regular TB in a matter of days rather than months as is currently required.
A dozen CSU faculty members will work on the two projects for the next two years.
Colorado State has managed a tuberculosis drug testing program for the National Institutes of Health for 10 years.
