At 3 years after initiation of trial therapy (a follow-up time which all patients reached), 27 patients (36%) were alive and tumour free (cured).
Although its stance is extreme, it is a useful antidote to the theory that easy money is a cost-free cure for economic ills.
For the estimated 3.5 million Americans with hepatitis C, the new drugs promise a pain-free cure.
Biomarkers are urgently needed as surrogate markers for relapse-free cure to individualise MDR/XDR-TB therapies, and to monitor progression and response to therapy.
Infectious diseases caused by mycobacteria differ from almost all other bacterial infections by the requirement for a very long duration of treatment in order to achieve relapse-free cure with the currently available therapies.
One of the substantial differences between the management of patients with MDR/XDR-TB and patients with other bacterial infections is the very long duration of antibiotic therapy necessary to achieve relapse-free cure.
The treatment with currently available anti-TB therapies to achieve relapse-free cure is long and undermined by a high frequency of adverse drug events, suboptimal treatment adherence, high costs and low treatment success rates.
However, T-cell based inT-cell basedcould tinterventionse to augment Mtb-specould immune responses tipachieve relapse-free cure, especially when the effect of antitubalancesis drug toeaugmentdoes not deliver, as in MDR tuberculosimmune XDresponseslosis.
Interestingly, although tofacitinib significantly accelerated the time to apparent lung sterilization when added to Std-Rx in BALB/c mice, it did not alter the time to achieve relapse-free cure, which required five months in both the Std-Rx and 2HRZT/4HRT treatment groups (Table 1).
Ingenol mebutate was also effective against inoculated murine SCC tumours (LK2 and PAM212) grown in nude mice (Foxn1 nu or BALB/cnu/nu) [ 9, 12], with haemorrhage [ 9], neutrophils and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity appearing to be important for relapse-free cure in these models [ 4].
