Tuberculosis (TB) is a treatable disease, but drug resistance is now a major public health concern exacerbated by the emergence of multi and extensively drug-resistant TB. India has the highest burden of Multi-Drug Resistant-TB (MDR-TB) bacteria with the World Health Organisation (WHO) putting the figure at 0.39 million cases worldwide and highlighting the need to stop its spread.
If long treatment, higher drug toxicity, and costly drug treatment make the MDR and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB challenging to treat, a group of scientists led by CSIR-Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology (CCMB) director Vinay Kumar Nandicoori has, in a new study, established that mutations in DNA repair genes could be used for the early diagnosis of MDR/XDR-TB.
The study authored National Institute of Immunology (NII)‘s Saba Naz and University of Delhi’s CGMCP - Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants, Paritiosh Kumar and researchers from other institutes had for the first time identified a ‘compromised DNA repair’ as one of the novel mechanisms for the evolution of drug resistance in Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (Mtb) which causes Tuberculosis (TB) in humans.
