Drug Resistance in Mycobacterium Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is a potentially deadly disease caused by pathogenic bacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It has existed in humans since ancient times and had high mortality rates without adequate treatment options before the invention of antibiotics , specifically streptomycin in 1943, that were potent enough to kill the bacteria. [6] In the 1960’s, following a drastic reduction in TB rates around the world, people began to predict that the disease could be completely eradicated within a century. [5] However, this goal proved overly-optimistic as drug-resistant strains had begun to emerge since the first use of antibiotics to treat TB. At first this was mainly due to only using a single drug, streptomycin, to treat the infection, prompting the use of multi-drug therapy but in recent decades multi-drug resistant (MDR), extensively- drug resistant (XDR), and totally-drug resistant (TDR) strains of TB have emerged. [1] Many of these strains are effectively incurable, especially the XDR and TDR strains, even for patients with access to an array of anti-TB drugs. [1] Given their grave public health threat it is crucial to study the molecular biology of the intrinsic and acquired mechanisms of resistance in M. tuberculosis in order to develop new drugs that avoid these mechanisms.
