Preventive TB treatment
Progression from untreated LTBI to TB disease accounts for approximately 80% of TB cases. Testing and treating people living with TB infection is essential to eliminating TB disease.
Preventive TB treatment substantially reduces the risk that LTBI will progress to active TB disease.
Preventive treatment of persons at risk is among the key components of the CDC’s ‘Think. Test. Treat TB’ campaign and the WHO ‘End TB’ strategy.
New diagnostics are needed
The ability to detect incipient TB and progression to active TB is a high priority with the WHO to ‘End TB’.
It is essential to develop newer diagnostic tests with significantly increased predictive value for the development of active disease among those who are infected than the currently available tests for LTBI (WHO, 2017).
More sensitive and specific tests are needed for TB infection to ensure that LTBI cases are not missed and persons without LTBI are not treated unnecessarily (CDC, 2020).
Current immune-based tests for LTBI (TST, IGRA) do not confirm the presence of active TB and cannot meet the needs of WHO ‘End TB’
priority of ramping up LTBI test-and-treat campaigns.
In clinical studies, Actiphage has shown the ability to detect incipient TB and may be a predictor of TB disease progression.
