A blueprint for a much-needed new generation of tuberculosis (TB) treatment has been developed by a team of scientists led at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

TB was once thought to have been eradicated but has become a major killer again in recent years, claiming two million lives annually – or one every 15 seconds – and infecting about a third of the world's population. One of the main causes of the resurgence is a lengthy and ineffective chemotherapy process which still relies on drugs developed in the mid-20th century.

Researchers at Strathclyde, together with partners at University College London and the University of Birmingham, have remoulded an existing antibiotic into a form which could be developed for new drugs which can tackle resistant forms of TB and reduce the time which treatment takes. Dr Geoff Coxon, of the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, who led the newly-published research, said:

“TB is a very complex disease. It's not only deadly in itself but is closely linked with HIV/AIDS. It's also very difficult to detect and treat. Globally, more than eight million people develop active TB every year and if trends continue, there will be a total of 36 million TB-related deaths by 2020 – yet the drugs used to treat the disease were developed in the 1950s. All of this highlights the urgent need for new, more effective drugs to treat it. Our research has found a promising scaffold for a new class of drugs to deal with this severe health problem.”

Dr Coxon and his fellow researchers created the new template by modifying a naturally-occurring antibiotic called thiolactomycin (TLM), to generate compounds which can mimic the way in which it acts. They found these acted well against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria which causes TB infections, and an enzyme which is targeted by TLM which helps the bacteria grow.