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Breakthrough TB Drug Tested At CSU

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
/
Wikimedia Commons

The first new tuberculosis drug approved in 40 years by the U.S Food and Drug Administration was tested by scientists at Colorado State University. The FDA has giveninitially approval this week for the drug bedaquiline to be used to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. That’s a rapidly growing and dangerous strain of tuberculosis that now afflicts more than 650,000 people around the world.

Bedaquiline was discovered by the Johnson and Johnson Company in 2005. A research team led by Anne Lenaerts and Ian Orme at CSU published a paper, in 2007, with collaborators at J&J revealing that the drug showed fast-acting, highly effective treatment of tuberculosis.

“The drug was very potent in these models, clearing infections even at relatively low drug concentrations with superior activity when compared to a conventional three-drug regimen,” said Ian Orme, a Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology said in a statement released Thursday by CSU.

Colorado State University has the largest group of tuberculosis researchers in the nation and is known internationally for its program.

Tuberculosis research at Colorado State has been funded largely by the National Institutes of Health and more recently by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

My journalism career started in college when I worked as a reporter and Weekend Edition host for WEKU-FM, an NPR member station in Richmond, KY. I graduated from Eastern Kentucky University with a B.A. in broadcast journalism.
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