Research overview-2025: integrating scientific progress to accelerate global tuberculosis elimination

Major scientific advances across the tuberculosis research continuum emerged in 2025, offering new opportunities to accelerate progress toward global elimination. This review synthesizes developments in diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and post-disease care, highlighting innovations that broaden access, strengthen mechanistic insight, and expand the scope of actionable tools. Diagnostic progress included artificial intelligence-enabled chest imaging, noninvasive molecular testing using tongue and stool samples, simple stool-based procedures suitable for decentralized settings, biomarkers that support treatment monitoring, low-complexity nucleic acid tests for extrapulmonary disease, and new point-of-care methods for detecting infection. Culture-free sequencing approaches further improved rapid identification of drug resistance. Therapeutic advances featured shorter all-oral regimens for drug-susceptible and rifampin-resistant disease, along with emerging compounds that target essential microbial pathways. Additional progress in host-directed therapies, vaccines, and nanoparticle-based drug delivery broadened preventive and therapeutic options. Conceptual developments challenged the validity of symptom-based disease categories and supported biologically grounded terminology, while consensus definitions for post-tuberculosis lung disease clarified the substantial long-term respiratory burden among survivors. Despite this momentum, health-system limitations and inequitable access continue to constrain real-world impact. Collectively, the scientific advances of 2025 were substantial and outline a clearer mechanistic and programmatic path toward tuberculosis elimination, but their success will depend on effective implementation and integration into routine care.