Funding for TB research falls well short of UN target
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
According to a new report, global funding for tuberculosis research totaled $915 million in 2020 — less than half of the $2 billion goal set at the 2018 United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB.
The report, released Thursday by the Treatment Action Group and the Stop TB Partnership, assessed TB funding trends from 2005 to 2020 and analyzed trends in investments since 2005.
According to the report, despite TB killing around 1.5 million people annually and despite a rise in reported deaths for the first time in 15 years, TB funding has remained “flat” since 2018. In 2020, TB research received less than 1% of the amount invested in COVID-19 research.
“On one hand, it's a relief that overall TB research funding didn't decline in 2020, considering how disruptive COVID-19 was for other TB services, like contact tracing or patient care,” Mike Frick, MPH, co-director of the TB program at Treatment Action Group, a research and policy think tank, told Healio. “But it's still disappointing that we've fallen so far behind international goals for research funding.”
Frick said the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic is “truly unprecedented in our lifetimes,” so the fact that it has gotten so much attention and research funding is a good thing.
“Before COVID-19, the idea that governments would spend over $100 billion a year on a single infectious disease threat was inconceivable,” he said. “Even acknowledging the exceptionalism of COVID-19, it's undeniable that COVID-19 and TB are treated wildly disproportionately. Since SARS-CoV-2 first began to spread, it's killed perhaps 2 to 3 times as many people as TB has but got over 100 times more research funding.”
The report revealed that, in 2020, public sector funding accounted for 70% of overall research and development funds at $641 million, whereas philanthropies were the second largest funding source, contributing $134 million. Private companies and multilateral organizations contributed $89 and $49 million, respectively.
Of the total research and development amount, 36% was spent on drug development, 18% on basic science research, 14% on diagnostics, 13% on epidemiology, 13% on vaccines and 6% on infrastructure and other needs.
Frick said the lack of resources allocated to TB research is “absolutely a political choice.” He explained that the $2 billion annual goal set by member states at the U.N. High-Level Meeting in 2018 was “quite modest.”
“COVID-19 showed the immense amount of progress that can be made in a short time when research is prioritized, and it's very possible to make a stronger commitment to TB as well,” he said.
If the financial target was reached, Frick said it could open the door for many TB-related accomplishments, such as safer, less toxic drugs that could make treatment courses shorter and more tolerable — paving the way for an easier cure while preventing resistance — and more reliable and user-friendly TB diagnostics, which could help curb transmission by identifying and treating people with TB sooner.
The real standout, however, is an effective TB vaccine, which Frick said could prevent millions of people from falling ill with TB around the world. Unfortunately, research on this has stalled because of a lack of funds.
“In 1 year, the world developed over 20 vaccines against COVID-19,” Frick said. “An entire century has elapsed since the discovery of the only TB vaccine, [bacille Calmette-Guerin], and still we have only this one TB vaccine, which only partially protects adults and adolescents from TB and alone won't be enough to end the TB epidemic.”
References:
Treatment Action Group. Tuberculosis research funding trends, 2005-2020. https://www.treatmentactiongroup.org/resources/tbrd-report/tbrd-report-2020/. Accessed on Dec. 9, 2021.
Collapse
Press Release.
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts