Insights into innovative therapeutics for drug-resistant tuberculosis: Host-directed therapy and autophagy inducing modified nanoparticles

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) remains one of the deadliest communicable dis- eases caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) since its discovery in the 1880s (Cambau and Drancourt, 2014; Singh et al., 2020). Over 1 billion mortalities have been recorded to date due to TB, and it was the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent before the COVID- 19 pandemic, with an estimated 10.4 million new cases and an average of 1.7 million deaths yearly (Gagneux, 2018; Barberis et al., 2017; Scriba et al., 2020; Allu ́e-Guardia et al., 2021; Organization, 2021). Further, about 25% of the world’s population are latently ill or infected, providing a substantial pool for future cases of active TB (Gagneux, 2018). The World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that in 2019 an average of 10 million new cases were recorded, with 1.2 million cases being children and an estimated total of 1.4 million mortalities (Orga- nization, 2019).