Medicines that taste like strawberries or mangos, cutting edge trials on preventing TB in kids, measuring how children’s bodies take up TB medicines. Kathryn Cleary profiles the amazing research done by the Desmond Tutu TB Centre in Cape Town
Medicines that taste like strawberries or mangos, cutting edge trials on preventing TB in kids, measuring how children’s bodies take up TB medicines. In this World TB Day feature,The world marked TB Day on March 24 and, according to the World Health Organisation, this year’s theme is It’s Time – time to accelerate diagnosis, treatment, prevention and, overall, time to end tuberculosis .
“This helps us to establish what the optimal doses of the treatment are, and whether we should dose kids differently according to weight, age, HIV status or nutritional status. A lot of the work that’s been done here has informed the doses of TB drugs that are used to treat MDR-TB [multidrug-resistant TB] in children around the world,” says Palmer.
Celebrations were in order last October after Unitaid – a multinational organisation that invests in innovations relating to HIV/Aids, TB and malaria – awarded the DTTC with a grant valued at more than R280 million to develop and evaluate child-friendly treatments and preventative therapies for MDR-TB.
Palmer tells Spotlight that originally children with MDR-TB had to be treated for up to 18 months, and most of the time this required hospitalisation and daily, painful injections. According to Hesseling, no clinical trial has ever been done on preventing drug-resistant TB in children, and, as a result, there is no evidence to guide international and national recommendations.Treating MDR-TB is more complicated than treating drug-sensitive TB and includes more medicines and possible hospitalisation, all of which can be avoided if the disease is prevented.“Prevention is better than cure”, says Hesseling, “but prevention needs to be feasible.
Study 35 is about short-course preventative therapy for drug-sensitive TB in children, which Hesseling says has already been shown to work well in adults. Instead of six months of daily treatment, Study 35 trials 12 doses of preventative therapy, a once-a-week medication over the course of three months.
“What we need to know in general then is how to get this into kids. We need a formulation or a form of the pill that kids can take like a tablet, and we need to know what dose you give to children and how safe it is,” she adds.As part of the DTTC’s clinical trials, studies and pharmacokinetics work, new drug formulations are being investigated for both the prevention and treatment of MDR-TB.
“We’re hoping to be able to also contribute evidence about how to make things more child-friendly,” says Palmer.
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