Experimental TB compound might make an effective drug

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Researchers who have been trying to design new drugs to fight tuberculosis said they think they have a winner — a new compound that stops the TB bacillus from building cell walls.

Tests in mice showed the compound could kill off the bacterial infection with no apparent side-effects, the New Medicines for Tuberculosis Consortium reported in the journal Science.

They hope to take the compound, called BTZ043, into further testing. It takes years to bring new compounds into human tests, and then years of human testing to show they can produce safe and effective drugs.

But TB experts agree new drugs are needed to fight tuberculosis, which infects up to a third of the world's population and kills 1.7 million people a year.

Tuberculosis can be cured with a cocktail of drugs that patients usually must take for months. The current standard regimen requires four antibiotics — all more than 40 years old — taken for six to nine months.

Drug-resistant forms of TB take as long as two years to treat with second-line drugs, which can cause severe side-effects. And a new strain called extensively drug-resistant TB or XDR TB sometimes cannot be cured with any existing antibiotics.

Vadim Makarov of the Bakh Institute of Biochemistry in Moscow and colleagues at the TB consortium noted that sulphur was common in the drugs that do work against TB.

In the study, they synthesised several sulphur-containing compounds, tested them against bacteria and fungi, and narrowed their search down to a class called nitro-benzothiazinones.

One of them, BTZ043, killed the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria in test tubes and reduced levels in the lungs and spleens of infected mice, with no side-effects, after one month of treatment.

Heart disease marker raises cancer risk, too

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — A protein that signals inflammation and heart disease may also show that a person has a high risk of cancer, researchers said.

People with high levels of C-reactive protein or CRP, already being studied for its links to heart disease, had a 30 percent higher risk of cancer, Danish researchers found. And cancer patients with the highest CRP levels were 80 percent more likely to die early, they found.

"These findings are preliminary and more research is needed to determine a precise link between CRP levels and cancer," said Dr. Eric Winer, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston. "However, these findings support a possible link between inflammation and cancer, and the C-reactive protein test could one day be used to help select those patients who should be more frequently screened for cancer," Winer added in a statement released by the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Dr. Kristine Allin and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen studied more than 10,000 people who had their CRP levels measured and then who were followed for 16 years.

About 1,600 developed cancer over this time and if they had high CRP levels at the beginning of the study, they were 30 percent more likely to be in this group of cancer patients.

And if a person both developed cancer and had high CRP levels, they were 80 percent more likely to die, whether from the cancer or something else, regardless of whether the cancer spread in their bodies, Allin's team reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Five years after cancer diagnosis, 40 percent of patients with high CRP levels were alive, compared with 70 percent of patients with low CRP levels.

CRP is associated with inflammation — an activation of the immune system. It is not clear precisely if inflammation may cause heart disease and cancer, or if it is a symptom of the diseases, but some doctors are beginning to believe that measurements of CRP should be part of a regular health check.

Bypass may be better for older diabetics

WASHINGTON, March 19 (Reuters) — Heart bypass surgery may be less dangerous for older patients with diabetes than angioplasty, researchers reported.

Overall, there was not much difference, they reported in the Lancet medical journal. But among patients aged 65 to 75 who had diabetes, the bypass surgery was markedly less deadly.

The study, paid for by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, is one of a series meant to help doctors and patients choose which treatment they want when several different options are available.

Mark Hlatky of Stanford University in California and an international team of colleagues studied the data from 10 different trials involving more than 7,800 patients.

The studies were all designed to see if there was any difference between bypass surgery, in which a vein is grafted to route blood around a clogged artery leading from the heart, and angioplasty, in which a blocked artery is stretched or scraped clean or propped open with a mesh tube called a stent.

Overall, 15 to 16 percent of the patients died. But patients with diabetes were 30 percent less likely to die if they got the bypass, Hlatky's team reported.