Gates turns attention to fighting TB
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy organisation, announced yesterday that it would give $104m to a non-profit organisation that fights tuberculosis (TB), a scourge in the developing world.
The money will be doled out over five years to the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development to develop new drugs to combat a disease that kills nearly two million people a year.
The four available drugs currently used to treat the disease are all more than 40 years old and take six months to work, while many patients have tuberculosis strains that are resistant to existing treatments.
The New York-based TB Alliance is developing 11 experimental tuberculosis treatments, with the drug moxifloxacin the most advanced candidate.
The Gates grant would pay for a large human test of moxifloxacin, which TB Alliance hopes to begin distributing widely by 2010.
