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The Long Road to End Tuberculosis

The vaccine and antibiotics available to treat tuberculosis have curbed cases, but more innovations are needed to halt its spread and counteract antibiotic resistance.

Still, while these developments provide cause for hope, each drug or vaccine faces a variety of challenges, ranging from financial incentives for clinical trials to the difficulty of discovering new antimicrobials that pass safety and efficacy tests. One research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a machine learning algorithm to rapidly find drugs that could thwart a different bacterium: Escherichia coli — a food-borne pathogen that causes diarrhea. The most alluring compounds target bacterial components that previous drug discovery efforts missed, including an efflux pump called EfpA that recent research shows may confer resistance to frontline antibiotics, namely isoniazid, by expelling them from inside the cell.

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