Evotec bags US$23.8m to fight tuberculosis

Evotec SE entered into a five-year partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to discover new treatment regimens that better address tuberculosis (TB). Current standard therapy for TB consists of a lasts at least six months and combines four drugs administered if the TB pathogen is not drug resistant.

The main objective of the partnership is to generate standardised, high-quality pre-clinical data to support the selection and development of new conbination therapies that are safer, shorter in duration and more efficacious than the current standard of care.

TB is an airborne infectious disease most commonly caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In 2017, 10 million people fell ill with TB, and 1.6 million died from the disease. The disease disproportionally affects young children, with an estimated 1 million children falling ill with TB and 230,000 of them dying in 2017. TB is also a leading cause of death for people living with HIV, with 300,000 of such patients dying in (2017). Multidrug-resistant TB is a health security threat. The WHO estimates that in 2017 there were 558,000 new cases with resistance to rifampicin, the most effective first-line drug, 82% of which were MDR-TB. As a result of years of inadequate diagnosis and treatment, these types of drug-resistant TB are more difficult and costly to treat, highlighting the urgent need for new, better, faster-acting treatments.