WASHINGTON – The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a Johnson & Johnson tuberculosis drug that is the first new medicine authorized to fight the deadly infection in more than four decades.
The agency approved J&J’s pill Sirturo for use with older drugs to fight a hard-to-treat strain of tuberculosis that has not responded to other medications. However, the agency cautioned that the drug carries risks of potentially deadly heart problems and should be prescribed carefully by doctors.
Roughly one-third of the world’s population is estimated to be infected with the bacteria causing tuberculosis. The disease is rare in the U.S., but kills about 1.4 million people a year worldwide. Of those, about 150,000 succumb to the increasingly common drug-resistant forms of the disease. About 60 percent of all cases are concentrated in China, India, Russia and Eastern Europe.
Sirturo, known chemically as bedaquiline, is the first medicine specifically designed for treating multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. That’s a form of the disease that cannot be treated with at least two of the four primary antibiotics used for tuberculosis.
The standard drugs used to fight the disease were developed in the 1950s and 1960s.
Nine patients taking Sirturo died in company testing compared with two patients taking a placebo. Five of the deaths in the Sirturo group seemed to be related to tuberculosis, but no explanation was apparent for the remaining four. Despite the deaths, the FDA approved the drug under its accelerated approval program.
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