New podcast episode: Preventing multidrug-resistant tuberculosis

23 Sep 2024

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released new guidance on preventative treatment for tuberculosis (TB). Thanks to new evidence from two randomised controlled clinical trials, the WHO now recommends that contacts of people with multidrug-resistant TB take six months of daily levofloxacin.

The TB-CHAMP and QUIN trials provided the first evidence of an effective treatment to prevent multidrug-resistant TB. TB-CHAMP was run in children, by the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL in partnership with Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Meanwhile, VQUIN was run mostly in adults across Vietnam, led by the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and the University of Sydney.

In the latest episode of the Trial Talk podcast, host Charlotte Hartley finds out more about these trials and how the teams came together to combine their data and strengthen their evidence, using new statistical methodologies developed at the MRC CTU at UCL.

The episode features interviews with Anneke Hesseling, Principal Investigator for TB-CHAMP, based at Stellenbosch University, and Trinh Duong, based at the MRC CTU at UCL, the trial statistician for TB-CHAMP and lead for the combined data analysis with VQUIN.

Further information:

• First effective treatment to prevent multidrug-resistant TB (2023 news story)
• TB-CHAMP trial webpage
• TB-CHAMP trial protocol
• VQUIN trial webpage (Woolcock)
• VQUIN trial protocol
• TB-CHAMP, VQUIN, and the first effective treatment to prevent multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (podcast)