Johns Hopkins Children's Center has received a $946,000
grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation to design a system that visually tracks the
behavior of the tuberculosis bacterium in the
body and its response to current and new drug
treatments.
The system, to be developed and tested initially in
animals, would enable direct real-time
observation of disease progression and response to
treatment. The hope is that ultimately it would
help scientists more quickly develop faster, cheaper drug
therapies for humans and let physicians
rapidly adjust drug treatment when and if needed.
Sanjay Jain, the lead investigator on the project,
which is being conducted at the
Hopkins Center for TB Research, says that the ability
to do real-time monitoring of TB, a disease that affects
8.8 million people a year, is critical in helping
researchers evaluate in real time the efficacy of drug
regimens. "In the global fight against TB, we desperately
need new ways to better monitor disease
response to new drugs and old ones," Jain said.
The new technology will in essence provide "live"
footage of TB-causing bacteria with the aid of
injected radio-tracing chemicals that attach to and
illuminate the germ and surrounding tissues in the
lung.
Multiple images taken by CT, PET and SPECT scanners
would then reveal, respectively, the
extent of lung tissue damage, inflammation (a hallmark of
disease activity) and the number of bacteria
present.
"With technology like this we should get accurate and
much faster assessment of drug efficacy
in animal testing, which means faster, cheaper experiments,
involving fewer animals," Jain said. "We
also hope that this technology could be used to monitor TB
in humans." The pressure for faster-acting
drugs and shorter treatment regimens is high because
current TB treatments require six or more
months to cure the disease completely. New drug
combinations are also needed to treat the multidrug-
resistant and the extensively drug-resistant strains of TB,
which are a growing problem worldwide.
Co-investigators in the project are William Bishai,
Martin Pomper, Jacques Grosset, Petros
Karakousis, Eric Nuermberger, Gyanu Lamichhane and
Catherine Foss, all of Johns Hopkins.
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