The Roadmap to new TB diagnostics

The overall vision of the New Diagnostics Working Group’s Strategic Framework 2018-2022 is to achieve early and universal diagnosis of all patients with all forms of TB to foster progress towards TB elimination, by making appropriate and affordable diagnostic solutions available at the right setting and ensuring that diagnostic results are linked to treatment and provide the basis for continuous drug resistance surveillance..

Goals

Development of new diagnostic tools and accompanying solutions to:

  1. Improve TB case detection through accurate tests, enabling patient-centred use at all levels of the health care system, for all populations, including children and those living with HIV, key populations including vulnerable groups, migrants, underserved groups, and develop innovative diagnostic strategies that ensure better outreach to people with TB.
  2. Enable timely and effective treatment to reduce mortality and ongoing transmission, and prevent antimicrobial resistance by rapidly and simply detecting resistance to existing and future drugs.
  3. Develop novel tests to enable rapid DST and treatment monitoring/test of cure to detect insufficient treatment sooner.
  4. Reliably identify individuals at risk of progression from latent TB infection to active TB disease in order to introduce targeted preventive therapy and cut transmission.

The following objectives are designed to guide progress toward the overall goals for the 2018-2022 period:

Objective 1: Ensuring the availability of critical knowledge to enable the development of new diagnostic tools and solutions.

Objective 2: Developing a portfolio of new diagnostic tools coupled with a package of accompanying solutions to ensure that results translate into patient treatment.

Objective 3: Evaluating the portfolio of new diagnostic tools and solutions, including new detection strategies, approaches for optimized use, and innovative delivery mechanisms, demonstrate patient benefit and predict likely impact for entire health systems and populations.

Objective 4: Ensuring that fully validated new diagnostic tools and solutions are widely available and appropriately used in endemic countries.

The Strategic Framework 2018-2022 identifies milestones and activities to support these objectives, as well as the required funding for each milestone for the five-year period.

Download PDF