Improving clinical management of drug-resistant TB: GenPath Africa member Prof Van Rie takes part in a workshop to form the BETTER Project
On 23-24 October 2024, GenPath Africa consortium member and co-lead of the project’s PARR-TB study Annelies Van Rie attended a workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, which focused on improving the clinical management of complex rifampicin-resistant TB (RR-TB) cases. The workshop brought together front-line clinical providers, researchers, and civil society organizations – including members of affected communities – to form the Building Expertise on Treatment of TB with Expanded Resistance (BETTER) Project. This initiative aims to develop a set of clinical practices that can guide systematic approaches to the care of people with RR-TB with expanded resistance to bedaquiline, linezolid, and nitroimidazoles.
Drawing on her expertise and experience in defining treatment outcomes for people with expanded resistance involved in implementation studies, Prof Van Rie gave a presentation on essential data elements and research priorities when treating complex RR-TB cases. She also introduced the development of a treatment recommender; a clinical decision aid which will be tested in GenPath Africa’s PARR-TB study. Over the course of the two-day workshop, her insights helped shape the group’s discussions around future research needs and best practices in clinical management of RR-TB, and helped identify gaps in current clinical protocols.
Collaborating with initiatives like the BETTER Project is just one way through which GenPath Africa partners are sharing knowledge gained through the PARR-TB study with key stakeholders. In the future, the next-generation sequencing practices and clinical decision aid tested in the study will also be transferred to national public health institutions, where they will be integrated into the routine diagnostic algorithm and patient management in the context of drug-resistant TB. This will support the project’s long-term goal of advancing precision medicine and precision public health strategies for controlling drug-resistant TB on a national level.
