The MM4TB project

Every year, 1.8 million people worldwide die from TB. Today's TB drugs are nearly 50 years old and must be taken for six to nine months for drug-sensitive disease and up to 24 months for drug- resistant disease. Long, demanding treatment schedules prove too much for many patients and the resulting erratic or inconsistent treatment can result in drug resistance, treatment failure or death.

The MM4TB research consortium has been assembled to discover anti-infective agents that will combat TB.
Evolved from the FP6 project, New Medicines for TB (NM4TB) - which successfully delivered a candidate drug for clinical development two years ahead of schedule - the MM4TB team will apply an integrated approach that includes tripartite screening strategies and medicinal chemistry, functional genomics and structural biology. This combination of approaches is a broad strategy to discover new compounds, perform pharmacological validation, identify targets, and analyze a variety of mechanisms of action during Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tb) infection.