Advances in Host-Directed Therapies Against Tuberculosis

This book discusses specific immune cell regulatory pathway(s), immune cell types, or other mechanisms involved in host responses to tuberculosis that can be potentially targeted for host-directed therapy (HDT). The pathways/mechanisms investigated are either protective - thus calling for pathway/factor enhancing drugs - or maladaptive - thus calling for pathway/factor inhibitory drugs. Discovery and development (pre-clinical and clinical) of candidate HDT agents will also be elucidated, as well as approaches for HDT of other diseases. The benefit to the reader will derive from learning about the biology of multiple host pathways involved in health and disease, how these pathways are disrupted or dysregulated during tuberculosis, and which druggable targets exist in these pathways. This book provides the reader with a roadmap of current and future directions of HDT against tuberculosis. Since the host pathways/factors involved in protective or maladaptive responses to tuberculosis are not disease-specific, information learned from the context of tuberculosis likely will be relevant to other infectious and non-infectious diseases.

Host-directed therapy is a unique, innovative, and burgeoning new approach for the treatment of infectious diseases, and specifically for tuberculosis, the leading cause of death by a single infectious agent. As a new field, no similar comprehensive survey of completed and ongoing research exists

Each section of the text contains several chapters written by a top expert in that specific area. The information provided represents a thorough and state-of-the-art analysis of the field

The implications for host responses and pathways are of broad interest in physiology and in various diseases of non-infectious origin (e.g, autoimmunity, cancer, metabolic disorders), or those that can be exploited for treating infectious diseases other than tuberculosis