Coordinated Action Tuberculosis

The Coordinated Action aims to facilitate the establishment of collaborative projects, strengthen R&D and propose new diagnostic, therapeutic and vaccine approaches in response to major issues related to tuberculosis.

Last updated on 16 December 2024

In brief

With 10.6 million cases and approximately 1.3 deaths worldwide in 2022 (WHO, November 2023), which makes it the second leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, tuberculosis remains a major public health problem. The aim of this Coordinated Action is to reduce this mortality.

Its objectives include:

Facilitating the diagnosis of the different forms of the disease in certain vulnerable populations (children, immunocompromised people, pregnant women)
Fighting anti-tuberculosis drug resistance through the development of new therapeutic strategies targeting Mycobacterium tuberculosis or the host
Developing innovative prevention strategies (candidate vaccines, correlates of protection, immune protection mechanisms, etc.)

Activities

This Coordinated Action is tasked with:

Ensuring cross-disciplinary scientific facilitation in order to stimulate high-level research on tuberculosis
Identifying research priorities and uniting the community around key topics
Strengthening collaborations and networks, particularly between basic, preclinical and clinical research, and internationally
Increasing the international visibility of tuberculosis research supported by our agency
Attracting and supporting the next generation of researchers, in particular to strengthen their role in the organisation and facilitation of events, and help promote their work

Key words: Tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, pathophysiology, host-pathogen interaction, prevention, vaccine, diagnosis, treatment, mortality, public health, basic research, clinical research, extra-pulmonary tuberculosis, latent tuberculosis, treatment resistance, host-targeted therapies, TB-HIV co-infection, immunodepression, pregnant women, children, adolescents, persistence, correlates of protection.

Workgroups

The coordinated action on Tuberculosis is structured around three cross-disciplinary workgroups (WGs) covering the pathophysiology of the disease (pathogen biology, host immune response, host-pathogen interactions), prevention, diagnosis, treatment and public health:

WG1: Tuberculosis in mothers and children (Olivier Marcy and Philippe Vande Perre)
WG2: Tuberculosis and immunosuppression (François-Xavier Blanc and Nathalie De Castro)
WG3: New therapeutic and vaccine strategies (Alain Baulard and Maryline Bonnet)