日本細菌学会

Despite the advent of Covid-19, tuberculosis (TB) obdurately remains the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent having claimed over a billion human lives in the past two centuries. There are many similarities between the two airborne diseases and much can be learned about controlling Covid-19 from TB. In the last two decades, intensive efforts have been made by the public and private sectors to discover and develop new diagnostics and therapeutic or prophylactic agents for TB. A promising drug pipeline is now in place and I will describe how this was achieved and how Covid-19 can benefit therefrom.