India comes up with TB breakthrough
India comes up with TB breakthrough
In perhaps the biggest tuberculosis breakthrough in two decades, Delhi’s National Institute of Immunology has identified five key genes that enable Mycobacterium tuberculosis to acquire the iron it needs to grow and promote the infection in humans. Experts say targeting genes within this cluster would help evolve better drugs to cure TB, which affects 15.4 million people worldwide.
“Some of these genes are conserved across a number of related bacterial families, so they are promising targets for drugs to treat TB and other bacterial diseases,” says NII’s lead researcher Rajesh S. Gokhale. When the TB bacterium infects humans, it moves to live in immune cells called macrophagus. The bacterium needs to feed on iron to survive and function, which cannot be found within the cell. So the bacterium secretes compounds called siderophores that scavenge iron from outside the cell. Though siderophores were discovered 50 years ago, how the bacterium worked so efficiently remained unexplained till now.
Observing that the expression of some genes increased significantly in response to low iron concentrations in the body, Gokhale and his team identified a new siderophore core and four new genes.
More: hindustantimes.com