New Tuberculosis Research Grants Awarded to International Teams Studying Treatment Outcomes and Prevention
RePORT was created by NIAID to address the continuing prevalence of TB as one of the world’s most deadly infectious diseases. Through a collaborative global network of public and private universities and hospitals, RePORT works to build and enhance biomedical and clinical research capacity by establishing in-country TB-specific data and specimen biorepositories and associated research at sites in sites in India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, China, and the Philippines.
The first research project selected, “Innovative Modelling for Predicting TB Treatment Outcomes in Global Cohorts,” will be led by a research team at Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and the Foundation for Scientific and Technological Development in Health. The team will investigate the impact of comorbidities such as diabetes, alcohol use, HIV, and malnutrition on adverse TB treatment outcomes, including recurrence and death.
The second winning research project, “Impact of Latent TB Infection and Trained Immunity on Susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 Infection in India and the Philippines,” will be led by researchers at Rutgers University, Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, and the University of the Philippines Manila. The team will examine if tuberculosis patients with trained immunity from a TB vaccine (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine) or latent TB infection, can provide protection against a COVID-19 infection.
The final project, “Associative BRICS Research in COVID-19 and Tuberculosis (ABRICOT)” will involve researchers from the Foundation for Scientific and Technological Development in Health, Wits Health Consortium, the National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. This study will enroll patients in Brazil, India, and South Africa to investigate the effect of severe COVID-19 on TB immunopathogenesis and how this affects, if at all, TB treatment outcomes.
TB is one of the most significant infectious causes of mortality and morbidity worldwide and is the number one cause of death among those infected with HIV. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.5 million people die from TB each year. Taken together, the expected results and information garnered from these studies will provide greater global clinical research capacity in high-burden settings and increase local access to quality data and specimens for members of each RePORT network and their domestic and international collaborators.
CRDF Global has been a proud partner of the RePORT program since 2012. For more information about RePORT, please visit the RePORT International website.
