Eli Lilly and Co. is pumping an additional $50 million into a partnership it created four years ago to treat multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, a disease found mostly in poor or developing countries.
Lilly started the partnership in 2003 and has donated two antibiotics that are used in a four-drug cocktail to treat patients. The drug maker also gave the technology, formula and trademark for the antibiotics _ Capastat and Seromycin _ to generic drug makers in countries hardest hit by the disease.
Lilly no longer markets the drugs in the United States.
"In fact, we were in the process of phasing them out when we discovered they were essential in the cocktail for treating the disease," said Gino Santini, Lilly's senior vice president for corporate strategy and policy.
The company spent $70 million to start the partnership. Its latest contribution will help train health care workers and support education for early identification of tuberculosis and HIV.
"Just throwing drugs at these countries would not have done the job," Santini said.
About 450,000 people worldwide have multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, according to Marcos Espinal, executive secretary of the Stop TB Partnership of the Swiss-based World Health Organization.
He said 8.8 million new cases of tuberculosis crop up every year, and about 95 percent of those come from developing countries. The highest rates of the disease are found in China, India, South Africa and countries from the former Soviet Union.
"TB is a disease of poverty, basically," Espinal said.
Lilly's partnership involves 14 organizations, including the International Federation of Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies and Espinal's Stop TB Partnership.
The drug maker announced its additional funding Thursday, the same day the World Health Organization released its latest tuberculosis report, which states that 1.6 million people died from the disease in 2005.
Espinol's partnership aims to treat 800,000 people with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis over the next 10 years. He said Lilly is making a "huge contribution" toward that push.
"Translating technology from two drugs that are not really profitable to developing countries that are fighting the diseases is something that should be praised, I think," he said.