Catalysis Foundation for Health to discover new TB biomarkers with $5M Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant

The Catalysis Foundation for Health (Catalysis), a 501 (c) (3) non-profit entity dedicated to developing sustainable diagnostics for the developing world, announced today that it has received a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  The grant money will be used to discover new tuberculosis (TB) biomarkers that can be used to improve diagnostic tests and potentially develop more effective TB treatments.  

To date, efforts to develop effective treatments against TB have been hindered by an inability to precisely and rapidly measure the efficacy of TB therapies. Current methods, based on sputum cultures, are difficult to perform and generate imprecise clinical endpoints, contributing to the length and cost of clinical trials.

Catalysis' biomarker identification initiative is designed to have major global public health applications. Its research efforts will focus on collecting and analyzing a comprehensive set of samples from TB patients in several countries.  Scientists will use these samples to identify and apply biomarkers for use in next-generation "bacterial load" diagnostic assays, analogous to HIV viral load assays so effectively used in managing AIDS patients.  These "bacterial load" assays, which measure the amount of bacteria in the body, could also lead to a more rapid, precise and efficient approach to developing effective TB drugs by providing a better indication of a patient's response to treatment.  

"The Catalysis Foundation's initiative is an important opportunity to address a critical need in tuberculosis drug development and disease management by developing quantitative measures of bacterial burden," said Clifton E. Barry, III, PhD., Chief, Tuberculosis Research Section, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and a Catalysis collaborator on the new study.  "Our goal is to provide new diagnostic tools to facilitate disease diagnosis, monitoring and treatment in remote geographic settings to help patients lead healthier lives free of the deadly disease caused by TB infection."