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Review
. 2020 Dec 17;4(6):581-600.
doi: 10.1042/ETLS20190154.

Approaches to treating tuberculosis by encapsulating metal ions and anti-mycobacterial drugs utilizing nano- and microparticle technologies

Affiliations
Review

Approaches to treating tuberculosis by encapsulating metal ions and anti-mycobacterial drugs utilizing nano- and microparticle technologies

Khaled H Alzahabi et al. Emerg Top Life Sci. .

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) is caused by a bacterial infection that affects a number of human organs, primarily the lungs, but also the liver, spleen, and spine, causing key symptoms of fever, fatigue, and persistent cough, and if not treated properly, can be fatal. Every year, 10 million individuals become ill with active TB resulting with a mortality approximating 1.5 million. Current treatment guidelines recommend oral administration of a combination of first-line anti-TB drugs for at least 6 months. While efficacious under optimum conditions, 'Directly Observed Therapy Short-course' (DOTS) is not without problems. The long treatment time and poor pharmacokinetics, alongside drug side effects lead to poor patient compliance and has accelerated the emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) organisms. All this, combined with the limited number of newly discovered TB drugs to treat MDR-TB and shorten standard therapy time, has highlighted the need for new targeted drug delivery systems. In this respect, there has been recent focus on micro- and nano-particle technologies to prepare organic or/and metal particles loaded with TB drugs to enhance their efficacy by targeted delivery via the inhaled route. In this review, we provide a brief overview of the current epidemiology of TB, and risk factors for progression of latent stage tuberculosis (LTBI) to the active TB. We identify current TB treatment regimens, newly discovered TB drugs, and identify studies that have used micro- or nano-particles technologies to design a reliable inhalation drug delivery system to treat TB more effectively.

Keywords: Mycobacterium tuberculosis; antibiotics; inhalation; nanoparticles.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that there are no competing interests associated with the manuscript.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
World Health Organization estimates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) infection incidence in 2019 [figure reproduced from 17].
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
World Health Organization estimates of HIV prevalence in new and relapse TB cases in 2019 [figure reproduced from 17].

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