Today, the most commonly used medicine comes in the form of loose pills, and patients have to take as many as 13 pills a day. But right now we have fixed-dose combinations that can bring the pill burden down from 13 to just three or four. This would make it much easier for patients to complete the treatment, cure their disease, and stop transmitting TB.

In coming years, we should be able to replace these tests and treatments with tools that are even more effective.

Within the next two years, we could see a nucleic acid based diagnostic with 98 percent accuracy that tests for drug resistance at the same time. This would attack a top cause of TB – the patients whose TB is missed by the test, who don’t get treated, and keep spreading the disease, including drug-resistant disease.

Within the next ten years, we hope to introduce new drugs that the bacterium has never seen before, and does not resist. Because there would be no drug-resistance in the early years, these new drugs could be standard first-line treatment for everyone with TB, whether they have MDR-TB or not. The need for testing for drug-resistant TB would plunge for years.

Eventually, however, the bacterium would develop resistance to the new drugs as well – which is why it is so important to continue work on a new vaccine. Over the next four years, we’ll have results from trials that could give us a more effective vaccine – and that would be a very important advance in the fight against TB.