Background: Despite the high global disease burden of tuberculosis (TB), the disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection, novel treatments remain an urgent medical need. Development efforts continue to be hampered by the reliance on culture-based methods, which often take weeks to obtain due to the slow growth rate of Mtb. The availability of a “real-time” measure of treatment efficacy could accelerate TB drug development. Sputum lipoarabinomannan (LAM; an Mtb cell wall glycolipid) has promise as a pharmacodynamic biomarker of mycobacterial sputum load.

By, Aksana Jones, Jay Saini, Belinda Kriel, Laura E Via, Yin Cai, Devon Allies, Debra Hanna, David Hermann, Andre G Loxton, Gerhard Walzl, Andreas H Diacon, Klaus Romero, Ryo Higashiyama, Yongge Liu, and Alexander Berg.