Admire Dube leads a research team at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, which is using nanoparticles to activate the human immune system to destroy TB bacteria.Credit: Admire Dube
It has been nearly six decades since the last tuberculosis (TB) intervention came to market. But one Zimbabwe-born researcher hopes to tap into modern technology to tackle the ongoing TB epidemic in Africa.
Admire Dube leads a research team at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, which is using nanoparticles to activate the human immune system to destroy TB bacteria. This helps control the rising antibiotic-resistant strains of TB.
Dube has been working on this research for seven years, and now his team is finally about to start human testing of the new TB treatment.
“A lot of the research on nanomedicine has been focused on cancer and so-called diseases of the West. I want to use it to treat infectious diseases like TB, which disproportionately impact Africa and other low-income regions,” Dube says.
Immune activation
Dube’s work started when he received a Fogarty grant which enabled him to set up his laboratory in 2017. Results from 2022 laboratory studies, and yet to be published studies in TB-infected animals, confirmed the researchers’ expectation that modification of the surfaces of nanoparticles triggers immune activation and reduction of the bacterium that causes TB.
“The nanoparticles being used now for cancer and other diseases are typically injected into the body, but we are looking at delivering them via inhalation for TB treatment,” explains Dube.
The nanoparticles Dube and his team are working with are about 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Other than being used to induce an immune response, they may also be loaded with drug molecules, for what Dube terms a “kick and punch” effect.
“The immune system response gives the kick, then the drug molecules give the punch, and this could offer potential for specific use among different patients with differing stages of TB disease.”
“We have very few drug pipelines for TB and we’re still using drugs that were developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Yes, they’re effective, but we are seeing increasing problems with drug-resistance, and that is where I believe our work can help bridge the gap.”
The World Health Organization calls multi-drug resistant TB a “public health crisis” and a “global health security threat”. According to its Global Tuberculosis Report 2022, published in The Lancet last December, the burden of multi-drug resistant TB increased by 3% between 2020 and 2021, with nearly half a million cases of rifampicin-resistant TB reported in 2021.
This technology does not come cheap, however. But the benefits need to be weighed against the high financial and socio-economic costs associated with TB drug resistance, and death.
“With nanoparticles, we are moving into the field of precision medicine,” says Dube. “We are tailoring treatment for particular patients or subsets of patients, where you know they will be most effective.
Much potential
“There is much potential we are yet to explore. While there may be accessibility challenges, the cost benefits will almost certainly be enormous in the long term,” Dube stressed.
The researchers are beginning to prepare proposals for the next, major stage of testing, which is testing on humans.
“We’ve seen positive results, with the bacteria dying just by introducing these particles into infected cells, and into the lungs of mice, for example.”
Human trials would mark the first time that nanoparticles have been introduced into humans to treat TB.
