This test is aimed at significantly speeding the treatment and diagnosis of DR TB by reducing the time to diagnose drug resistance from 4 months to 2 weeks
India Health Fund (IHF), a collaborative initiative of Tata Trusts and The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has announced its support for HealSeq’s innovation – a biomarker-based blood test that is expected to accurately determine a patient’s response to TB treatment in 2 weeks of its initiation.
IHF’s support to HealSeq’s innovation is aimed at developing and validating an accurate, low cost, easy to administer test that can identify Drug Resistant TB early and, guide fast clinical decision to shift to second line therapies.
HealSeq’s innovation is a host bio-marker-based blood test, which can detect RNA signatures from TB patients as early as 2 weeks after treatment initiation. The abundance of these RNA signature genes can help physicians to classify patients as good-responders, intermediate or poor-responders to the treatment. Intermediate or poor responders, diagnosed as DR TB patients, can be immediately shifted to second line therapies. The test is at 1/6th the cumulative cost of the multiple tests that need to be taken during the TB treatment course and can be administered using a simple RT PCR kit.
Dr Nagasuma Chandra, Co-founder HealSeq Precision Medicine says, “TB treatment is given for a long duration, typically lasting 6-9 months. However, not all TB patients respond to the first line of treatment. It is therefore important to recognise the efficacy of the treatment as early as possible, so that the patient can be switched to second-line therapies. HealSeq’s innovation is aimed at designing an accurate molecular test that will track the patient’s response to the disease before and after the treatment and improve prognosis. India Health Fund’s support to HealSeq occurs at a very crucial time as we validate blood-based host biomarkers for TB.”
Madhav Joshi, Chief Executive Officer, India Health Fund, says, “With the large TB burden and challenge that India faces, the current medicines, tests, vaccines need to be updated with truly modern tools. TB patients need a short, simple, well-tolerated and affordable treatment that will help improve health outcomes. India Health Fund is pleased to support HealSeq which is expected to be a big step forward in the early diagnosis and treatment of DR-TB.”