STONY BROOK, N.Y., February 22, 2007 - The Institute for Chemical Biology & Drug Discovery (ICB&DD), at Stony Brook University has received a five-year $3.14 million Cooperative Research grant to develop chemotherapeutics to treat tuberculosis (TB). The grant from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases/National Institutes of Health was announced today by Iwao Ojima, Ph.D., Director of the ICB&DD and was awarded to Peter J. Tonge, Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Tuberculosis Research Program and his team at the Institute.
The grant marks a milestone achievement for the ICB&DD, whose mission is to promote multidisciplinary research at Stony Brook that builds on existing strengths on campus. Dr. Tonge and his collaborators have developed a series of compounds that are potent inhibitors of a validated TB enzyme drug target. The lead compounds have promising activity against both drug-sensitive and drug-resistant TB bacterial strains.
The project is now moving into a preclinical development phase in which these first generation enzyme inhibitors will be optimized so that they can be used in clinical studies for the treatment of patients infected with drug-resistant TB. Multi drug-resistant TB has emerged as a serious threat, not only in developing countries but also in developed countries. Thus, a cure for drug-resistant TB infection is urgently needed. The project also includes researchers at the Colorado State University and the National Jewish Medical Research Center in Denver.
TB is primarily an airborne disease caused by the bacterium, Mycobacterium. tuberculosis (Mtb), and usually attacks the lungs, but can also attack other parts of the body as well. Although curable, the disease continues to spread across the globe and claims close to two million lives each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). A century ago TB was a leading cause of death in the U.S. Due largely to the introduction of effective antibiotics and improvements in living conditions, the number of persons with TB in the U.S. declined steadily from the turn of the century.
Although the burden of TB in the U.S. is low, the disease is a matter of grave concern in much of the rest of the world. Both the largest number of deaths and the greatest number of deaths per capita occurs in the WHO Africa region, where HIV has led to a rapid growth of the TB epidemic. The WHO estimates that one-third of the world’s population, approximately 1.86 billion people, is infected with Mtb, and that 16.2 million people currently have the disease. Recently strains of Mtb have emerged that are resistant to both first and second line drugs. These extensively drug resistant strains of TB (XDR-TB) are virtually untreatable and pose a major threat to human health.
