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More Medicines for Tuberculosis (MM4TB)

Every year, 1.8 million people worldwide die from TB. Today's TB drugs are nearly 50 years old and must be taken for six to nine months for drug-sensitive disease and up to 24 months for drug-resistant disease. Long, demanding treatment schedules prove too much for many patients and the resulting erratic or inconsistent treatment can result in drug resistance, treatment failure or death.
The MM4TB research consortium has been assembled to discover anti-infective agents that will combat TB. Evolved from the FP6 project, New Medicines for TB (NM4TB) - which successfully delivered a candidate drug for clinical development two years ahead of schedule - the MM4TB team will apply an integrated approach that includes tripartite screening strategies and medicinal chemistry, functional genomics and structural biology. This combination of approaches is a broad strategy to discover new compounds, perform pharmacological validation, identify targets, and analyze variety mechanisms of action during Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tb) infection.

MM4TB will employ novel whole cell and phenotypic approaches for M. tb, in conjunction with a prioritized list of validated targets, seeking to generate novel drug leads. A major objective of this initiative is to validate at least five new drug targets pharmacologically and discover at least one family of candidate drugs (CD). These CD can be transferred to biotechnology companies or pharmaceutical partners for further development. The involvement of two leading pharmaceutical companies in MM4TB is a major asset; in its previous form as NM4TB (New Medicines for Tuberculosis) the consortium successfully discovered the benzothiazinone (BTZ) series, now in late stage preclinical development.

SCIPROM had accompanied MM4TB since the project negotiation and it now acts as the project management partner.

The project began on 1 February 2011 and will run for five years. For more information, visit http://www.MM4TB.org.

About Tuberculosis
TB is one of the oldest infectious diseases known to man and its agent, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has infected one third of the world's population. As a result, someone dies from the disease every 15 seconds and 30 million more people will lose their lives to TB in the next decade. Although directly observed short course chemotherapy (DOTS) is available to treat the disease, this treatment is old, slow and inefficient by the current standards of the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, multidrug resistant strains have appeared in increasing numbers during the past 15 years as the global TB and HIV epidemics have intersected as poverty spreads. Now, with increased public and private funding, some of the most innovative approaches are being used to identify and validate targets for new TB drugs, and to implement the screening and medicinal chemistry processes required to identify lead compounds for the generation of candidate drugs.