Dr. Carl Nathan, the R.A. Rees Pritchett Professor of Microbiology and chairman of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, and his lab are working to discover new drugs in the fight against tuberculosis. Collaboration has now begun between Dr. Nathan's lab and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi-Aventis to screen hundreds of thousands of different compounds with the goal of discovering new weapons in the fight against the world's most common cause of death from bacterial infection.
Every year, more than 1.7 million people worldwide die from TB. It is estimated that one-third of the world's population is latently infected by the tuberculosis bacterium. About 10 percent of those with latent infection develop active disease.
Today's TB drugs are more than 40 years old and must be taken for six to nine months for drug-sensitive TB, which is the form of the disease that is susceptible to treatment, and up to 24 months for drug-resistant TB, which sometimes even then does not respond to therapy. Long, demanding treatment schedules prove too costly or difficult for many patients. Incomplete treatment can result in drug resistance, treatment failure or death.
Weill Cornell has secured funding for the screening activities conducted by Dr. Nathan's team from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Since 2008, seven Weill Cornell research projects led by four different investigators have been supported by these prestigious awards — a remarkable total for a single institution. The work is also supported by the Abby and Howard P. Milstein Program in Chemical Biology.
The researchers are testing compounds, hoping to find agents that show promise for optimization and potential drug development, with the goal of creating new therapies to treat TB. The two companies are collaborating with Dr. Nathan's lab in two different ways. Sanofi-Aventis has sent 80,000 compounds for screening at Weill Cornell. In contrast, Dr. Nathan has sent a postdoctoral fellow to GSK's Diseases of the Developing World campus in Tres Cantos, Spain, to screen over 2 million compounds using conditions developed at Weill Cornell.
The work at GSK is part of an experiment called the Open Lab. Eight scientists, representing six academic institutions or biotechnology companies from four countries, including the United States and South Africa, are working on their own research projects in association with GSK scientists at the Tres Cantos research campus, located outside Madrid, Spain. The facility has made capacity for independent researchers to work alongside approximately 120 GSK scientists, accessing the state-of-the-art facilities and expertise. Most of these collaborations are supported by a new philanthropic entity, the Tres Cantos Open Lab Foundation, on whose governing board Dr. Nathan serves.