Susanna's Story
The Gates Foundation announced today that it is giving $104 million to the TB Alliance to develop a faster treatment for tuberculosis.
Folks have gotten so used to hearing about Bill Gates making large donations to global health research and development, however, that I think it makes sense to keep in mind who the ultimate benefactors are going to be.
During a press conference before the announcement, Dr. Jaime Bayona of Peru talked about a mother in her fifties named Susanna. “First, her oldest son became ill with TB and then in the next two years, three of her older, grown children also developed TB,” Bayona recounted.
All four of the children were diagnosed with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, or MDR-TB, a particularly deadly form of TB that typically requires two years of antibiotic therapy to cure. As a result, they could not be treated with the primary drugs that are available for TB.
Eventually, five of Susanna's children were diagnosed with TB and four of them died. Then, she, too, developed multi-drug resistant TB.
“She asked us, ‘How can it be fair for such a thing to happen to one family? How could this happen?' ” Bayona told reporters. “And the question to us is ‘What can we do?' And what we can do is develop medicine that can properly treat MDR-TB successfully.”
And that is exactly what the TB Alliance plans to do with the money from the Gates Foundation.
Dr. Maria Freire, head of the TB Alliance, expects it will take another $100 million to develop a full range of TB treatments that can be taken over a period of days or weeks (as opposed to the current six months or more). But the hope is to make the first of these new drugs, which is being tested in partnership with Bayer, available by 2010.
—Christine Gorman
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Reader's Comments
It is wonderful news that the Gates Foundation has quadrupled its investment in TB Alliance, and I thank you for the personal element added to this story as people sometime forget the human toll when it comes to neglected diseases.
A few facts about TB: it kills 2 million people annually, treatment cure generally take 130 doses!, and the most commonly used diagnostic was developed in 1882 and only detects the disease in ~45-60% of cases.
A key point for me is the call by Dr. Freire for governments to solidify this commitment by the Gates Foundation. The UK government made a significant pledge to TB Alliance and Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) in March, and that's a step in the right direction; however, the vast amount of money for innovative PDPs comes from philanthropy, primarily the Gates Foundation (79% in 2005, according to Mary Moran's report).
Chirac and Torreele show in their May 10, 2006, Lancet article that only 1.3% (21 out of 1,556) of the new drugs developed over the past 30 years were for neglected tropical diseases and tuberculosis, even though these diseases account for 12% of the global disease burden. This situation has remained virtually unchanged from 5 years ago.
The ongoing World Health Assembly has a chance to approve an actionable working group from 2 essential health, needs-driven R&D resolutions. And the upcoming G8 summit has a chance to act on its pledge of support for R&D on neglected diseases. Please urge your governments to support an actionable resolution so that there are less Susannah stories out there.
The R&D Appeal launched in June 2005 by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), its founding partners, Oxfam, and the BIOS initiative, urges governments to take greater leadership in R&D on neglected diseases. In just over 10 months, more than 5,900 scientists, policy-makers, industry and NGO members (including 19 Nobel laureates) have signed onto the Appeal. Join them: www.researchappeal.org
posted by: AM Sevcsik | May 25, 2006
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