From Empirical Discovery to Targeted Therapy: The Evolution of Tuberculosis Treatment

Tuberculosis (TB) chemotherapy was once considered a crowning triumph of modern medicine but has since reemerged as a persisting paradox. While therapeutically still effective in most cases, current frontline treatments for TB remain largely unchanged from their introduction over 50 years ago and continue to require a minimum of 6 months of multidrug treatment to achieve durable cure, limiting both their individual and population level impact. Its impact has been further eroded by the emergence and spread of drug resistance. Although new antibiotics active against drug-resistant TB are beginning to emerge, their integration into shorter, more effective regimens has proven difficult. This review revisits the evolution of TB chemotherapy and explores how individual drug properties shape overall regimen efficacy and treatment duration. While initially shaped by efforts to prevent resistance-based treatment failures while minimizing toxicity, the empirical development of combination chemotherapies revealed additional determinants of treatment efficacy that extended beyond conventional antimicrobial potency and impacted treatment duration. By integrating classical findings with modern insights into pharmacology, lesion physiology, and bacterial persistence, we highlight the potential that mechanism-based insights into existing TB chemotherapies could guide the rational design of next-generation, treatment-shortening combinations.