How drug-resistant TB evades detection in standard tests
Researchers have identified that standard WHO-approved tests for drug-resistant tuberculosis often fail because they only screen for mutations within a specific gene region. Mutations occurring outside this region allow the bacteria to evade detection and continue spreading, necessitating more comprehensive diagnostic approaches.
Why it matters
Improving TB diagnostic accuracy is critical to curbing the spread of multidrug-resistant strains, which pose a significant threat to global public health.
Tuberculosis (TB) is a killer disease. The discovery of antibiotics pushed forward the fight against the bacteria that causes this illness. But another emerging challenge is drug-resistant TB.
TB is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Rifampicin is the primary antibiotic used to treat TB. When TB-causing bacteria become resistant to Rifampicin, it leads to multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) or extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), which are much harder to treat.
Bacteria develop resistance through genetic mutations, namely changes in their DNA. The resistance to Rifampicin mostly occurs when a gene called rpoB mutates.
Currently, WHO-approved tests focus only on a section of the rpoB gene, called the Rifampicin resistance determining region (RRDR), that contains 81 base pairs of DNA.
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