Tuberculosis (TB) experts at Johns Hopkins have evidence from a four-year series of experiments in mice that anti-inflammatory drugs could eventually prove effective in treating the highly contagious lung disease, adding to current antibiotic therapies.
The scientists are planning further experiments in animals infected with TB to find out if any of the already-approved anti-inflammatory drugs would work. The new study results, to be reported in the July 2 issue of Nature, not only offer promise of a complementary or alternative therapy to antibiotics, but also open the door to vaccines designed to block the TB bacterium’s inflammatory chemical pathways, the researchers say, according to a Johns Hopkins press release.
The research team bases its claim on their recent studies in mice showing precisely how disease-causing TB bacteria provoke an inflammatory response in immune system cells and surrounding lung tissue, and that blocking the action of a key inflammation-triggering enzyme, a type of adenylate cyclase, stalled TB disease.
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