Photos courtesy of WHO/STB/Colors Magazine/J. Mollison
An ancient scourge, tuberculosis has made a comeback in recent years. According to a recent World Health Organization report, tuberculosis (TB) incidence increased by one percent in 2003.1 Though one-third of the world's population carries latent TB, roughly eight million people per year experience progression to the active form of the disease. Prevalence and mortality have gone down, however, since the early 1990s, meaning that while the number of cases has increased, TB control programs are finding and curing increasing numbers.
But the situation has deteriorated rapidly in Africa, the former Soviet Union, and parts of Eastern Europe due to the HIV epidemic,...
WHERE THEY SLEEP
Attacking the latent bacilli may be one path to shorter regimens, according to Clifton Barry, head of the tuberculosis research section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. During the latent state, the bacterium doesn't replicate and may be more drug-tolerant if not outright drug-resistant, as drugs typically target processes that are important only during replication, such as cell-wall synthesis. Barry says the importance of the latent stage is being increasingly recognized, as he noticed at a recent Keystone meeting that he co-organized. "It's something that's emerging as a consensus in the field. We have to understand the biology of this nonreplicating state of the bacterium to both inform drug discovery for latent disease and to shorten the course of chemotherapy."
Barry's lab, along with the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases and the TB Alliance, is helping to design a drug based on the compound PA824 that could have such an effect. Latent bacteria might languish in an anaerobic state, and traditional drugs targeting facets of high growth, such as cell-wall synthesis, might fail to shorten therapy. These quiescent bugs do maintain some metabolic function, however, such as the ability to maintain and energize the membrane and acquire nutrients. Moreover, latent
Metabolic targets are generally a neglected area of study in bacterial pathogenesis, according to John McKinney, an associate professor at Rockefeller University in New York. "We have little idea of how these organisms acquire and assimilate nutrients in vivo," says McKinney. In 2000, his lab reported finding that in vivo the organism switches from sugar to fat as its carbon source.4 The key: isoci-trate lyase (ICL), an enzyme essential for metabolizing fatty acids and mediating the bug's fat-burning potential. Disrupting a gene encoding ICL (
In more recent work, McKinney's group has shown that this pathway is actually even more important than previously thought. Knocking out
Targeting the nutrient supply of
ENERGY PRODUCTION
Other promising targets involve inhibiting the bacterium's energy production centers. Researchers at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development (J&JPRD) recently identified an active new compound, R207910, that appears to interfere with ATP synthesis, though the precise mechanism has not yet been elucidated.6 After identifying R207910 from a large chemical library, they sequenced resistant
His group has no direct evidence that R207910 kills latent bacilli, although mouse studies suggest that it might, perhaps via interference with intracellular pH homeostasis. Andries and colleagues showed that certain combination therapies that included their compound achieved the same bacterial load reduction in one month as is observed in two months with current, standard therapies.
Work from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, though more preliminary, also suggests ATP synthase as a target.7 "Two different approaches ended up on basically the same enzyme pathway," says senior author Harvey Rubin, a professor of medicine and microbiology at Penn. Rubin and coworkers stopped the bacteria from multiplying by inhibiting an enzyme called type II NADH dehydrogenase, an early player in the ATP pathway. They then found that a drug called phenothiazine, used previously to treat schizophrenia, killed the bacteria in cultures and suppressed its growth in mice that had acute TB infection. Though phenothiazine is a nonstarter as a drug candidate because of its toxicity, these results suggest a possible therapeutic strategy. Rubin notes that if he can reduce ATP concentrations, then enzymes that require ATP will be disrupted as well. "We really believe that if we can knock off this particular enzyme, then we might have a way to shorten therapies, even in the dormant stage," says Rubin.
No target, say researchers, can insure that the organism will not mutate and build up resistance. Still, many are optimistic that with the increased focus on TB, it's only a matter of time before modern biological tools will yield, for the first time in 40 years, fruitful, novel drugs that can have a major public health impact. McKinney notes that current, standard drugs were based only on the study of the organism's growth in a test tube. "We've been going after the wrong targets, so we've got drugs that are suboptimal," says McKinney. "If we go after the right targets, do things in a more rational way, we're bound to come up with other drugs." According to the TB Alliance's Spigelman, his organization and its partners will have six new drugs in clinical trials this year.
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