Comprehensive Resistance Prediction for Tuberculosis: an International Consortium

International guest speaker Ana Gibertoni Cruz, from Oxford University Hospital, Modernising Medical Microbiology, University of Oxford will be speaking in a special seminar at TRI on the 13th January hosted by Alex Cristino. 

Speaker: Ana Gibertoni Cruz, MD MPH

In 2014, 9.6 million people were estimated to have fallen ill with tuberculosis (TB), and 1.5 million died from it—TB now ranks alongside HIV as a leading cause of death worldwide. To reduce this burden, detection and treatment gaps must be addressed. Drug resistant disease is a significant problem and only a minority of such cases is currently detected and treated, allowing for the transmission of primarily resistant disease. WHO now calls for drug susceptibility testing for all cases and foresees this can only be delivered by roll-out of new genetic based testing to allow early, rapid and accurate diagnosis of tuberculosis and drug resistance whether by amplification or whole genome sequencing (WGS) methods.

CRyPTIC aims to identify all, or nearly all, TB genomic variation conferring drug-resistance to all clinically used anti-tuberculosis drugs, using WGS of a large number of isolates from around the world. This will be done combining accurate methods for variant calling, analysing candidate genes and genome-wide association studies. Our ultimate aim is that whole genome sequencing can replace slow, culture-based drug susceptibility testing enabling rapid-turnaround near-to-patient assays to revolutionize drug-resistant TB identification and management.