Indian Scientists Take Big Step To 100% Tuberculosis Cure, And Save 30 Lakh People Annually

Tuberculosis is a deadly disease, infecting about nine million people across the globe each year -- 32% of them just in India -- costing billions of dollars in healthcare.

The problem is, many people don't even know they may have the infection, as it can remain dormant for even decades before becoming infectious.

Wikimedia Commons

The Tuberculosis bacterium is naturally hunted by our white blood cells called macrophages, just like other infections. But in this case instead of killing the bacteria, it forms a sac-like body called a granuloma around it. That keeps the bacteria dormant for as long as it's present.

However, that sac can rupture when your immunity is lowered, whether due to physical weakness or another illness like HIV. When that happens, the Tuberculosis infection can break out and wreak havoc on the body.

How Tuberculosis will be cured?

But a team of researchers from the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Bose Institute in Kolkata and Jadavpur University, have pieced together how tuberculosis is released from the sacs macrophages form around them in the human body. This is something researchers around the world have been studying for years with no luck.

They discovered that the bacteria secretes a protein called MPT63 that may play a part in its jailbreak. At certain levels of acidity, these protein structures change formation, and where they previously had no function they suddenly become toxic to the host cells, ie the macrophages. That ends up killing the cells, and releasing the bacteria.

"Our team would now try to validate these findings in field strains of TB bacillus and see whether they can be used to develop new therapeutic interventions," Dr Krishnananda Chattopadhyay, Head of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics Division at IICB and team leader, told India Science Wire.

Dr Krishnananda Chattopadhyay with some of his colleagues in their lab - India Science Wire

With this discovery, researchers can now begin looking into methods to negate the effect of the MPT63 protein, keeping the Tuberculosis permanently locked in, and saving millions of Tuberculosis patients.

The team also consisted of Achinta Sannigrahi, Indrani Nandi, Sayantani Chall, Junaid Jibran Jawed, Animesh Halder, Subrata Majumdar, Sanat Karmakar. Pending verification, the results will be published in the journal ACS Chemical Biology.