Spotlight reflected on the results from two TB trials - SimpliciTB and TRUNCATE-TB, reported at the 30th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2023) held on 19-22 February 2023 in Seattle, Washington, USA, featuring TAG TB Co-Director Lindsay McKenna, elaborating on what comes next as an alternative to the six-month drug-susceptible standard of TB care.

Some strains of the TB bacterium have mutated to become resistant to some of the drugs commonly used to treat TB. Accordingly, one of the first questions to ask when someone has TB is which drugs will be effective in fighting that person’s TB. Unfortunately, quick answers to this question are not always available. As a consequence, people are at times treated with drugs that won’t work for their particular strain of TB. What’s worse, these drugs often have significant side effects.

Some cases of TB can be successfully treated in as little as two months – a third of the current standard of six months in South Africa and most other countries. This is according to early findings from the landmark TRUNCATE TB trial presented at 2022 Union World Conference on Lung Health.

The screening, diagnosis, and treatment of tuberculosis (TB) in children remain far from optimal – and in many respects lag behind what can be done for adults.

Completing the six months of treatment for standard drug-susceptible tuberculosis (DS-TB) can be hard. Apart from side effects associated with the medicines, people may feel better after a month or two and be tempted to stop taking the treatment. Maintaining treatment adherence is even harder for drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) since the medicines have more serious side effects and treatment can last as long as two years.