Antifungal Drug, Potential TB Killer

Filed in archive Drugs, Vaccines and Therapeutics on March 15, 2007

Tuberculosis or TB remains one of the world's deadly infectious diseases killing an estimated 2 million people worldwide each year.

Because of the rise of multi drug-resistant TB strains (MDR-TB), the World Health Organisation, the Bill Gates Foundation and the European Union have all launched initiatives to tackle the problem on TB.

Funded by the EU's NM4TB (new medicines for tuberculosis) project, a team from the University of Manchester is trying to find alternative drugs that could be used to treat MDR-TB and found that chemicals called azoles -- the active agent in many antifungal drugs -- kill the TB bacteria, and could be effective in tackling the emerging drug-resistant strains.

According to Professor Andrew Munro, who led the research in Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences:

"The class of drugs called azoles are able to kill off fungal infections by blocking the actions of one of its P450s that is essential for maintaining the cell structure.

We were able to show in laboratory experiments that various types of these azole drugs were also very good at killing the TB bacterium, and also that they bind very tightly to a number of the TB P450 enzymes that we have isolated -- inactivating their function."

Results of the Manchester study were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The findings offer potential new approach in killing TB and have already attracted interest from the pharmaceutical industry.

Find more details from the full report.