The University of Oxford has announced grants totaling nearly $8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and others in support of efforts to speed up diagnosis of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

Announced on World TB Day (March 24), the grants include $2.2 million (£1.53 million) from the Gates Foundation and £4 million ($5.75 million) from the London-based Wellcome Trust and the UK government's MRC Newton Fund. Nearly half a million people a year develop multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), which requires time-consuming tests to diagnose and to determine the drugs to which it will respond. One way to speed up diagnosis and treatment is to use whole genome sequencing to determine the genetic code of the TB bacterium, which can then be compared against a library of other TB bacteria with known drug resistance. The grants will enable Oxford researchers to expand that library by collecting and analyzing a hundred thousand additional samples from around the world.

Sample collection, drug resistance testing, and genome sequencing will be conducted by teams at various partner organizations, including the Adolfo Lutz Institute in Sao Paulo, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, the Foundation of Medical Research in Mumbai, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The Oxford team will then assemble the results into a single open-access database. The team also will work to develop artificial intelligence that can predict drug resistance.

"The program will take around five years, but when complete it will give us the baseline we need for quick, effective TB diagnosis using whole genome sequencing," said clinical research fellow Ana Gibertoni Cruz. "Faster results will mean not just faster treatment, but the right treatment, potentially saving lives and avoiding further transmission."