Mycobacterium tuberculosis: Success through dormancy
By M. Gengenbacher, Stefan H. E. Kaufmann. FEMS Microbiology Reviews, 2012
700 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major health threat, killing near to 2 million individuals around this globe, annually. The sole vaccine developed almost a century ago, provides limited protection only during childhood. After decades without the introduction of new antibiotics, several candidates are currently undergoing clinical investigation. Curing TB requires prolonged combination chemotherapy with several drugs. Moreover, monitoring the success of therapy is questionable due to the lack of reliable biomarkers. To substantially improve the situation, a detailed understanding of the crosstalk between human host and the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is vital. Principally, Mtb’s enormous success is based on three capacities: First, reprogramming of macrophages after primary infection/phagocytosis in order to prevent its own destruction; second, initiating the formation of well-organized granulomas, comprising different immune cells to create a confined environment for the host–pathogen standoff; third, the capability to shut down its own central metabolism, terminate replication and thereby transit into a stage of dormancy rendering itself extremely resistant to host defense and drug treatment. Here we review the molecular mechanisms underlying these processes, draw conclusions in a working model of mycobacterial dormancy and highlight gaps in our understanding to be addressed in future research.
Subfields: Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, Surgery
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b45e68b00cae684254d43386c01ec2c4f061449d
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In Epidemiology
Citations in the corpus
- The importance of the viable but non-culturable state in human bacterial pathogens (2014, background): “The VBNC state of M. tuberculosis (Mtb) is also known as latency or dormancy, and contributes to over two million Mtb carriers around the world (Gengenbacher and Kaufmann, 2012).”