Ken Duncan began the year with a new job to fight an old foe.

In January, he became a senior program officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's tuberculosis (TB) program, where his job will be to shepherd the development of new drugs for the disease.

Duncan's main goal is to help foster drugs that might cure TB in a matter of weeks rather than in months. There have been no new drugs for TB in nearly 40 years, and existing ones must be taken for at least six months.

A veteran of TB research, Duncan directed GlaxoSmithKline's Action TB Initiative, which funded research in the UK, US and South Africa, from 1994 to 2004. He is putting to use the expertise he gained then in integrating basic science and drug discovery across the academia-industry divide to clear the hurdles in TB drug development—a poor understanding of disease pathogenesis and a lack of effective tools to study it (see page 272).

Linking research and drug discovery is a tricky process, but based on his long experience with the industry, Duncan says that certain advances, such as finding biomarkers for cure and the application of imaging technologies to TB research, would encourage companies to develop shorter treatment. “Being able to visualize the disease in real time and in situ would have the effect of making it possible to study new drugs much more rapidly than we can at the moment,” he says.