NEW YORK/GENEVA, MAY 26, 2023 — The international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) welcomes today’s passage of a resolution at the 76th annual United Nations World Health Assembly to strengthen countries’ diagnostic testing capacity. With almost half of the global population having little or no access to disease testing, this resolution is an essential step towards improving global access to diagnostic tools, said MSF. Increasing access to testing for a variety of diseases is critical as it is necessary in order to put people on the best medical treatments possible.

Access to TB drug bedaquiline, a backbone medicine for drug-resistant TB treatment regimens, remains out of reach for too many.

On Friday 24th March, the MSF Science Twitter account will be hosting a Twitter Spaces event (a live audio discussion) on ‘Treating drug-resistant tuberculosis: the past, present and future’!

Médecins Sans Frontières urges the Indian Patent Office to reject the secondary patent application filed by Johnson & Johnson to prevent the company from extending its monopoly on bedaquiline beyond the primary patent’s expiry in July 2023.

With newer TB drugs to go off patent in 2023, MSF calls on Johnson & Johnson, Otsuka, and TB Alliance to remove additional barriers blocking generic manufacturers from entering the market.

A shortage of TB tests at this critical juncture will be disastrous.

In an article published in the journal BMJ Global Health, authors from the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Access Campaign analyse the development and approval of two newer drugs for treating drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB), bedaquiline and delamanid, in the current pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) paradigm, and the failure of the regulatory approval process to define the drugs’ role in multidrug regimens to improve treatment outcomes.

BOSTON/PARIS, 18 October 2021 — Hundreds of patient volunteers from four continents have enrolled in a trial that aims to find safer, shorter, and effective treatments for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), an airborne, infectious disease that has grown resistant to standard medications. A group of scientists and clinicians led by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Partners In Health (PIH) and Interactive Research and Development (IRD) make up the endTB consortium conducting the groundbreaking study funded by Unitaid. 

Médecins Sans Frontières released a new issue brief, Local diagnostics to meet local health needs, with recommendations how to improve local production of diagnostics in low- and middle-income countries.

New Delhi/Geneva, 20 April 2021 – Next week the Indian government is expected to decide whether it is willing to override patents on two critical tuberculosis (TB) drugs following a court petition filed at the Mumbai High Court by two survivors of TB and activists. If the government is willing to issue the ‘compulsory licenses,’ it would increase access to the newer TB drugs bedaquiline and delamanid for people with multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB in India. The international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) supports the court petition and urges the Indian government to take this critical step that would allow price-lowering competition among generic manufacturers for drug-resistant (DR) TB medicines in India.