Two stakeholders of the TB Alliance are partnering to establish a South African Clinical Trials Consortium with an emphasis on TB-HIV and MDR-TB. The 5-year agreement between the Medical Research Council (MRC), the host of TB Alliance offices in Cape Town, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), aims to improve infection and resistance control in the context of high levels of TB-HIV co-infection. By upgrading the clinical trial capacity in a key endemic country like South Africa, this initiative will complement and support the TB Alliance‘s efforts to develop new drugs.
“New drugs are urgently needed to address the problem of today’s long treatment period of 6 months, growing numbers of new TB cases arising from latent infection exacerbated by HIV co-infection, as well as the challenges posed by MDR-TB,” said Dr Bernard Fourie, Director of the MRC’s Lead Programme for TB Research and coordinator of the TB Alliance R&D Coalition, who will be heading the SATB Trials.