Potential new treatment for tuberculosis

Scientists from Deakin University have discovered a potential new treatment for tuberculosis (TB) — a disease whose resistance to current medical therapies has enabled it to infect 30% of the globe's population.

“The disease is evolving resistance to the two frontline drugs that have been used to treat TB for almost 30 years: Isoniazid and Rifampicin," explained Dr Luke Henderson, a senior research fellow within Deakin's Institute for Frontier Materials.

“Now, around half a million of all TB cases are multidrug resistant and around 10% of these are extremely drug resistant."

Furthermore, while TB was once kept out of first-world nations by vaccinations, the disease is no longer isolated to poorer countries. The London Assembly recently reported that parts of London had higher rates of the disease than countries such as Rwanda, Eritrea and Iraq. And while TB currently affected less than 1% of Australia's population, human movement across the globe and increasing drug resistance meant that TB also posed a potential risk to this country.

It was therefore a case of serendipity when the Deakin scientists stumbled across their potential TB treatment when researching a group of molecules for a completely different condition — prostate cancer.

“While we were working on a group of 25 to 30 compounds, six of the most active components proved to be able to inhibit the growth of TB," he said. Specifically, they blocked the growth of the bacteria which leads to the disease.

“The good thing about these molecules is that we can easily generate and modify a lot more," Dr Henderson added. This was a result of a technique called 'click chemistry', which enables substances to be generated quickly by joining small modular units together like Lego.

“We can synthesise them in one day, which means that we can speed up the research process."

Writing in the journal ChemMedChem, the Deakin University scientists say the compounds “serve as an excellent starting point for further development of antitubercular therapies". The team's next step will be to focus on understanding how the molecules select and kill TB bacteria and whether they may cause side effects