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:
- 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.
- 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.
- Develop novel tests to enable rapid DST and treatment monitoring/test of cure to detect insufficient treatment sooner.
- 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.
