Volunteer for NIAID-funded clinical studies related to
tuberculosis on ClinicalTrials.gov. Searching for new drugs
against TB can be quite frustrating, NIAID's Clifton Barry III,
Ph.D., admits. It is a simple matter to destroy Mycobacterium
tuberculosis (Mtb), the microbe that causes TB, in a test tube.
But Mtb has an extraordinary ability to live in a state of
nearly suspended animation within immune system cells, so
completely ridding the body of Mtb is difficult. Still, Dr.
Barry believes that many of the 2 million deaths each year from
TB could be prevented with better drug therapies. He and his
collaborators have used two techniques, one a "kitchen sink"
approach, the other involving repeated chemical tweaking, to
screen chemicals for their ability to kill Mtb. The kitchen sink
approach began with an established anti-TB drug called
ethambutol. Dr. Barry's team developed a way to easily create
thousands of compounds that differ only slightly from
ethambutol. More than 100,000 of these compounds were scree