Tuberculosis Drug Discovery: From Evil to Allies

Tuberculosis (TB), a widespread infectious disease, has been a curse for humanity for many years. To cure this deadly disease, various medications are used in combination therapy. However, treatment of TB becomes problematic due to the appearance of drugresistant (DR), multidrug-resistant (MDR), extremely drug-resistant (XDR), and totally drug-resistant (TDR) TB strains, as well as co-infection with HIV. For nearly half a century since the first TB drug was invented, there had been a scarcity of new anti-TB drugs. Though in the past decade about half a dozen new drugs have been added to the arsenal of anti-TB therapeutics, the need for inventing more effective anti-TB drugs should still be a focus of medicinal chemists. Thus, a complete understanding of the disease—from pathogenesis to the development of new, clinically useful anti-TB drugs—would provide medicinal chemists with the rationale and enthusiasm to search for new anti-TB agents that might have a better chemotherapeutic profile compared to available therapies. In view of this, the present book chapter shall discuss an overview of the current therapeutic drugs, including their discovery, mode of action, approvals, and patient compliance, along with the newly approved drugs and repurposed drugs currently in clinical trials for the treatment of TB.