Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City has announced two grants totaling $6.8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study tuberculosis (TB) drug development.

The grants to Weill Cornell Medicine and the TB Drug Accelerator will expedite efforts to search for new drug targets within the bacteria and identify new lead compounds, two significant bottlenecks in TB drug development. One of the grants will support research that uses genetic methods to probe how small molecules can kill or inhibit the growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). Another approach will test the small molecules on an Mtb overexpression library, which consists of about 1,000 Mtb strains, each designed to produce too much of an essential gene product.

The multiprong approach is shedding light on how the small molecules of interest inhibit growth of Mtb and their potential toxicities and suggest other structurally related molecules that may be more effective. Taken together the information is helping researchers prioritize which compounds to advance for drug development. The second grant will support efforts to shorten TB treatment time.

“These grants allow us to apply the assays we’ve developed in the last few years, focusing on the most promising targets for TB drug development,” said Weill Cornell Medicine professor of microbiology and immunology and principal investigator Dirk Schnappinger. “We could treat TB much better in the regions where the disease takes its biggest toll, if we could shorten the time patients need to take antibiotics and discover more effective medications.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Gerardo Huitrón)