NEWS ALERT - 10 February 2025 l Geneva, Switzerland
New Price Reductions for Medicines to Treat Drug-Resistant TB
The Stop TB Partnership’s Global Drug Facility (GDF) today announced a massive 54% price reduction for bedaquiline produced by Lupin and Macleods, now available via GDF at $90 per treatment course, down from an August 2023 price of $194.
The bedaquiline (B) price decrease, along with price decreases up to 13% for pretomanid (Pa), linezolid (L), and moxifloxacin (M) resulting in an all-time lowest price of $364 per treatment course for the most commonly-used, 6-month BPaLM regimen.
First recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) in December 2022 (i), the GDF price for BPaLM decreased 38% in just two years. These price decreases translate to lower costs for nearly every WHO-recommended DR-TB regimen, including the BEAT-TB and endTB regimens recommended in June 2024 (ii).
The benefits that these price reductions will bring to national TB programmes are enormous.
GDF projects to save donors and clients US$ 7.1 million over a two-year period, an amount sufficient to procure an additional 79,000 bedaquiline treatments for a disease in which only 176,000 people worldwide are treated annually (iii)Significant additional savings will also be realized by large countries that typically procure bedaquiline directly from suppliers by leveraging and referencing GDF prices to negotiate lower prices for themselves.
“We are going through challenging times, but in TB we never had it the easy way, with so limited funding we had for the overall response. We go ahead and support people with TB and these days is important to get great news about dropping the price of commodities. It is, therefore, increasingly important to have sustainable initiatives like GDF that can continue to incentivize suppliers to develop and offer new TB products at the lowest possible prices”, noted Dr. Lucica Ditiu, Executive Director, Stop TB Partnership. “More than ever, we will need to stretch every shilling, rupee, dinar and the like to ensure all those in need have access to the best, life-saving TB diagnostics and treatments”, she added.
New Tests to Ensure Sensitivity to DR-TB Medicines
GDF has also expanded its Diagnostics Catalog to include bedaquiline vials for drug-susceptibility testing (DST) on Becton Dickinson’s BACTEC MGIT automated liquid culture platform (iv), enabling TB laboratories to more easily test for bedaquiline resistance, a task that to date has been extremely challenging for many countries.
“Because of the vital role that bedaquiline plays in both existing and future TB regimens, protecting the medicine’s efficacy is of the utmost urgency”, said Dr. Brenda Waning, Chief of Stop TB’s Global Drug Facility. “DST is essential to ensure people are treated only with medicines that are effective, which also reduces the risk of developing resistance. It would be devastating if the world lost bedaquiline as an effective medicine.”
The bedaquiline vials are available from GDF at a price of $1.34 per test, along with the BACTEC MGIT tubes, diluent, and reagents needed to run DST.
The GDF Diagnostics Catalog includes many other products for first- and second-line DST, including BACTEC MGIT moxifloxacin vials and linezolid powder.
For more information about these products, please refer to GDF Product Catalogs and Ordering Lists. For detailed information on regimen pricing, please refer to GDF TB Regimen Prices. For further support, please contact your GDF Country Supply Officer or email gdf@stoptb.org.
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(i) WHO. 2022. WHO consolidated guidelines on tuberculosis. Module 4: treatment - drug-resistant tuberculosis treatment, 2022 update. Geneva: WHO. https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/365308/9789240063129-eng.pdf.
(ii) WHO. 2024. Key updates to the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis: rapid communication, June 2024. Geneva: WHO. https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/378472/B09123-eng.pdf.
(iii) WHO. 2024. Global TB report, 2024. Geneva: WHO, p.2. https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/379339/9789240101531-eng.pdf.
(iv) Stop TB Partnership Global Drug Facility. 2025. January 2025 diagnostics, medical devices and other health products catalog. Geneva: Stop TB Partnership.
https://www.stoptb.org/sites/default/files/documents/23.01.25%20GDF_Diag%20and%20MD_catalog.pdf
