A team of scientists at Centre for Science and Industrial Research-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIR-IICT) have embarked on developing a new and affordable tuberculosis drug that could break the barriers of resistance in the bacteria towards TB drugs.

Funded under CSIR initiative on the Fast Track Translation (FTT) Projects to develop affordable drugs, a team of scientists lead by Dr. Dr. S. Chandrasekhar, director, CSIR-IICT and his team have taken up the assignment with an objective of developing alternative routes for the production of the TB drug to make the medicine available at an affordable price. “The drug, Bedaquiline which acts against drug resistant TB bacillus was first developed by Jansen (J&J in USA), however this is very costly and not affordable by the poor. As an alternative, we have undertaken the process development of new drug which can not only resolve the affordability issue but can also break the barriers of drug resistance in the bacteria,” said Dr. S. Chandrasekhar.

Explaining further about the drug resistant TB bacteria, another senior principal scientist Dr. Prathama Mainkar said that the treatment of tuberculosis has become a challenge because of the disease causing pathogen assuming multi-drug-resistant (MDR) character in the patients. Consequently it results in ineffectiveness of the drug and it become redundant.

Dr. G. V. M. Sharma, chief scientist, also informed that the TB drug under development by CSIR-IICT has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (US FDA). To manufacture the drug at an affordable and commercial scale, the CSIR-IICT scientists are planning to approach the like minded pharmaceutical industry players. “We will approach identified pharma industry for the demonstration and commercialization after completion of the lab scale process. To make the drug be produced at cheaper rates there will be lot of changes like cutting down in number of operations, modification of reagents and simplifying protocols,” said Dr. Sharma.

In addition to the TB drug, the CSIR-IICT scientists are also working on two more drugs under the FTT initiative, as the research is underway; the scientists are expecting to come out with these new drugs by next year.

As it is well known that excess and unnecessary use of antibiotics leads to the development of drug resistance bacteria, which may cause multiple diseases and has no cure. This has become a big challenge to the medical fraternity across the globe in general and India in particular.

To overcome the challenge of drug resistant bacteria, the novel efforts initiated by the CSIR-IICT scientists to develop a new drug to fight the drug resistant bacteria is regarded as a great breakthrough for the TB patients suffering with drug resistant bacteria.