POTENTIAL INNOVATIONS AND ACTION ITEMS

Through the presentations provided in this session and the subsequent discussions, individual workshop speakers and participants noted key innovations and action items. They include the following:

• More research to obtain more data on children with MDR TB is urgently needed. Such data could assist those attempting to develop better diagnostics and treatment regimes for children.
• Expansion of ongoing efforts to address the challenges associated with diagnosis and treatment of TB-HIV coinfected patients is key to controlling the spread of MDR TB.
• “South-to-south transfer,” or the sharing of expertise and best practices from one resource-limited setting to another, offers an opportunity to learn from relevant experiences elsewhere in the world.

Finally, since the workshop, a research network on pediatric drug-resistant TB, The Sentinel Project on Pediatric Drug-Resistant TB, has been launched by two workshop participants.⁷

⁷ Since the workshop, Mercedes Becerra, Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School, and Soumya Swaminathan, Head, Division of Clinical Research, National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis, collaborated to launch a research network on pediatric drug-resistant TB. As of April 2012, more than 140 individuals from more than 30 countries had come together to collaborate on joint projects through the network, titled The Sentinel Project on Pediatric Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis. More information is available at http://sentinel-project.org/ (accessed April 30, 2012).