Research effort to seek new drugs for TB

SEATTLE, June 13 (Reuters) - Eli Lilly and Co. has joined forces with U.S. health experts in the search for new drugs to fight tuberculosis, which kills someone in the world every 20 seconds, the company said on Wednesday.

About 1.6 million people die from TB each year, with the disease hitting hardest in African countries that are also struggling with the AIDS virus.

Current drugs for TB are four decades old.

"It was thought to be a thing of the past. That was a mistake," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, part of the National Institutes of Health, which joined Lilly in the effort.

"We've got to re-engage industry. That is what this partnership is all about," he said.

The NIAID spends about $120 million a year on TB research.

Fauci said the partnership will focus more resources on the contagious disease, especially as drug-resistant forms of TB pose more of a threat. He said a new drug to fight TB could be available in 10 years.

Drug-resistant TB came to light with last month's odyssey of Andrew Speaker, a U.S. patient with extensively drug resistant TB, or XDR TB, who evaded public health officials' efforts to keep him from traveling to and from his wedding in Greece.

The partnership, announced at the Third Annual Pacific Health Summit in Seattle, will be a not-for-profit drug research group.

"Because TB is such a complicated disease, it's unrealistic for a single company or single agency to do all this on its own," Gail Cassell, Lilly's vice president of scientific affairs and head of the partnership, said at the meeting.

Lilly has given $15 million to the project over the next five years. It will pay for the leasing of lab space and equipping the facility with research tools.

The company has also opened its library of more than 500,000 chemical compounds that researchers will test as possible TB treatments.

Drugs discovered through the partnership will be used to enhance efforts from The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, a non-profit funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several other groups.

Others joining Lilly include Merck & Co. Inc. , the Infectious Disease Research Institute, the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and the University of Washington's Department of Global Health.

(Additional reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago)