For Immediate Release
Friday 3 November 2006
Contact Mark Harrington
+ 1 347 515 3791

Activists call for $2.0 billion per year in TB R&D, a five-fold increase

New Report Documents Dramatic Shortage in R&D Funding
for New and Improved tools and Calls for an
Increase Totaling $2 billion Annually to Curtail Tuberculosis

PARIS—A fivefold increase annually from less than $400 million spent in 2005 on TB R&D is needed to achieve the WHO's global targets of slashing TB incidence and death rates over the coming decade. Treatment Action Group's unprecedented report, Tuberculosis Research & Development: A Critical Analysis, tracks the major funders of basic, targeted and operational TB research, revealing a lower than expected baseline of investment in new and improved tools to control TB at a time of escalating threat from drug-susceptible, multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR)-TB.

"The necessary money will only come with a worldwide TB advocacy movement that raises the political profile of tuberculosis," said Javid Syed, Treatment Action Group's TB/HIV Project Director.

TAG interviewed 100 institutions and documented the top 40 investors in TB R&D in 2005. Results highlighted in the report showed that new tools including diagnostics, drugs and vaccines received combined funding of $206 million in 2005-diagnostics, $16 million; drugs, $120 million; and vaccines, $70 million. At this rate, only $2 billion will be available over the next decade, whereas the Global Plan to Stop TB 2006-2015 estimates that $9 billion will be needed, revealing a new TB tools funding gap of $7 billion. Basic science and operational research received $94 million and $50 million, respectively, but there are no global targets from which to compare the investments in basic and operational research.

"Clearly the current tools are failing us as evidenced by the annual TB death toll of 2 million and the continuing spread of extensively drug resistant (XDR)-TB," said Mark Harrington, Executive Director of Treatment Action Group. "Without a major scale-up of investment in TB R&D we will be unable to prevent 20 million deaths over the next decade. TB needs to learn the lessons from AIDS, where activists and scientists joined forces to demand more resources for better research leading to improved diagnosis and treatment, saving millions of lives since 1986."

Among national governments, the report shows the leading funders were the US, the UK, France, and India. The top institutional donors were the US National Institutes of Health ($158 million), The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($57 million), the UK Medical Research Council ($31 million) and US Centers for Disease Control ($20 million). The private sector accounted for 11% of the total investments in 2005.

To improve upon decades old technology and match urgency with need, Treatment Action Group demands donors of TB R&D worldwide-including G8 and developing countries-to increase their investment fivefold, from less than $400 million per year to $2 billion per year, with $1.05 billion directed towards new tools research and $950 million directed towards basic science, infrastructure development, and operational research each year, for a total of $20 billion in TB R&D over the coming decade.

Additionally, TAG calls for the development of a comprehensive, global TB research agenda to incorporate the entire spectrum of research that is needed to achieve the goals set forth in The Global Plan to Stop TB. This plan should address the need for major expansion of the basic and operational research foundation that supports new tool development.

TAG also urges the standardization of donors' internal tracking systems according to disease, research category, and research phase to enable more comprehensive annual tracking of R&D investments in all diseases of global health importance. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are urged to provide transparency around their investments in TB R&D. This will help inform efforts by policymakers, research funders, and TB control programmers worldwide to coordinate their investments in TB research.

TB R&D: A Critical Analysis is on-line at http://www.treatmentactiongroup.org. The author was Cindra Feuer, with Javid Syed and Mark Harrington editing. TAG's report will be presented as a late-breaker session at the 37th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Paris, France, on Saturday 4 November 2006.

About Treatment Action Group: The Treatment Action Group (TAG) is dedicated solely to advocating for larger and more efficient research efforts, both public and private, towards finding better treatments, a cure, and a vaccine for AIDS. TAG's TB/HIV Project works to combat TB/HIV co-infection through a combination of community-based advocacy, education and mobilization efforts involving AIDS advocates in developed and developing countries.