The Gates Foundation announced today that it is giving $104 million to the TB Alliance to develop a faster treatment for tuberculosis.
Folks have gotten so used to hearing about Bill Gates making large donations to global health research and development, however, that I think it makes sense to keep in mind who the ultimate benefactors are going to be.
During a press conference before the announcement, Dr. Jaime Bayona of Peru talked about a mother in her fifties named Susanna. “First, her oldest son became ill with TB and then in the next two years, three of her older, grown children also developed TB,” Bayona recounted.
All four of the children were diagnosed with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, or MDR-TB, a particularly deadly form of TB that typically requires two years of antibiotic therapy to cure. As a result, they could not be treated with the primary drugs that are available for TB.
Eventually, five of Susanna's children were diagnosed with TB and four of them died. Then, she, too, developed multi-drug resistant TB.
“She asked us, ‘How can it be fair for such a thing to happen to one family? How could this happen?' ” Bayona told reporters. “And the question to us is ‘What can we do?' And what we can do is develop medicine that can properly treat MDR-TB successfully.”
And that is exactly what the TB Alliance plans to do with the money from the Gates Foundation.
Dr. Maria Freire, head of the TB Alliance, expects it will take another $100 million to develop a full range of TB treatments that can be taken over a period of days or weeks (as opposed to the current six months or more). But the hope is to make the first of these new drugs, which is being tested in partnership with Bayer, available by 2010.