The commemoration of World Tuberculosis (TB) Day, saw Japanese company Otsuka Pharmaceutical and the South African Department of Health on Friday launch the Delamanid Clinical Access Programme (DCAP) in Johannesburg. 

Under this year’s theme ‘Unite to End TB’ World TB Day aims to build a global awareness of TB – a curable disease that kills over 4 000 people daily and remains a destructive epidemic in much of the world.

The day also commemorates Dr Robert Koch’s discovery of the TB bacillus in 1882, which paved the way towards detecting and curing the disease.

The DCAP programme aims to provide Delamanid  – one of only two new TB medicines approved in the last 50 years – through a novel, pre-approval pilot project.

The project will focus on three often underserved groups: children between the ages of twelve and eighteen years; HIV co-infected patients and diabetes patients with poor treatment outcomes.

Delamanid received its first regulatory approval from the European Medicines Agency in 2014 as a medicine for treatment of adult pulmonary MDR-TB, and has since been distributed to about 45 countries for over 2 100 patients.

The World Health Organization added Delamanid to its Essential Medicines List in 2015.