Dr. Soyeon Kim Published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)
Dr. Soyeon Kim, a Senior Research Scientist at Frontier Science Boston, is co-author on an original article, Bacterial Factors in Relapse after Tuberculosis Therapy, published in the August 30, 2018 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Written while Soyeon held academic appointment at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and School of Public Health, the article analyzes pretreatment isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis obtained from patients with drug susceptible tuberculosis who subsequently had a relapse or were cured. The authors wanted to determine any correlations between the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of a drug below the standard resistance breakpoint and the risk of relapse after treatment.
The study used data from the Tuberculosis Trials Consortium Study 22 (development cohort), and assessed relapse and cure isolates to determine the MIC values of isoniazid and rifampin that were below the standard resistance breakpoint.
The study found that decrements of MIC values of isoniazid and rifampin that were below the standard resistance breakpoint in drug susceptible M. tuberculosis strains had an influence on treatment outcomes, with the risk of relapse increasing together with the MIC value. In addition, the authors confirmed these findings in isolates obtained from patients with drug susceptible tuberculosis in a validation cohort. The authors suggest that additional studies that are performed in larger, well-defined prospective cohorts and that include testing of gradations in the MIC below the standard resistance breakpoint of pretreatment culture isolates will be useful to better validate these findings.
The study was Funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The citation for the article is: Bacterial Factors That Predict Relapse after Tuberculosis Therapy.R. Colangeli, H. Jedrey, S. Kim, R. Connell, S. Ma, U.D. Chippada Venkata, S. Chakravorty, A. Gupta, E.E. Sizemore, L. Diem, D.R. Sherman, A. Okwera, R. Dietze, W.H. Boom, J.L. Johnson, W.R. Mac Kenzie, and D. Alland, for the DMID 01-009/Tuberculosis Trials Consortium Study 22 Teams. N Engl J Med 2018;379:823-33. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1715849