FDA approves first new tuberculosis in 40 years

December 31, 2012 in Medications

The Food and Drug Administration says it has approved a Johnson & Johnson tuberculosis drug that is the first new medicine to fight the deadly infection in more than four decades.

The agency approved J&J's pill, Sirturo, for use with other older drugs to fight hard-to-treat .

Sirturo is the first medicine specifically designed for treating multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. That's an increasingly common form of the disease that cannot be treated with at least two of the four primary antibiotics used to treat tuberculosis.

The standard drugs used to fight the disease were developed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Roughly one-third of the world's population is estimated to be infected with the bacteria causing tuberculosis.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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tekram
Dec 31, 2012

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This looks similar to a quinolone drug such as cipro, but it is not. Discovered by Koen Andries and his team at Janssen Pharmaceutica, Bedaquiline was described for the first time in 2004.
Bedaquiline affects the proton pump for ATP synthase, which is unlike the quinolones, whose target is DNA gyrase.
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