April 3 (Bloomberg) -- Bayer AG’s antibiotic Avelox may shave months off the time it takes to cure tuberculosis, according to a study that could help improve treatment rates and fend off drug-resistant forms of the disease.

While it usually takes six months to treat an uncomplicated case of tuberculosis, 80 percent of patients given Avelox plus standard care had no sign of the infection in their saliva after just eight weeks. That compares with about 63 percent of those given an older medication in addition to the traditional three- drug treatment cocktail, a study in the journal Lancet found.

Public health officials say they urgently need to find new treatments for tuberculosis, which infects about 8.8 million people and kills 1.7 million each year. Many people with uncomplicated disease fail to complete the six-month treatment and half a million contract drug-resistant disease annually. The drug known chemically as moxifloxacin already is sold by Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer to treat pneumonia.

“Moxifloxacin, in combination with other first-line anti- tuberculosis drugs, could shorten the time needed to cure tuberculosis by several months,” according to the researchers led by Richard Chaisson, from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s center for tuberculosis research. “A reduction in the duration of tuberculosis therapy would substantially improve outcomes,” they said.

Brazil Hospital

The study, presented at a medical meeting in 2007, included 170 patients treated at a single hospital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s office of orphan product development and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Additional trials, already under way, are needed to confirm whether doctors can safety shorten treatment times without reducing the effectiveness of the care, the researchers said.

The drug’s benefit was “surprisingly large,” wrote Hans L. Rieder, from the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease in Switzerland, in an editorial that accompanied the study. “However, it remains to be seen” if newer antibiotics like Avelox will allow treatment to be shortened, he said.

“What is needed, and is perhaps in reach, is a regimen that is well tolerated, of reasonably short duration, without an unacceptably high frequency of adverse drug effects, and thus an effective treatment,” Rieder wrote.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michelle Fay Cortez in London at mcortez@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: April 2, 2009 19:01 EDT