UCL institute becomes UK's first WHO Collaborating Centre to help beat tuberculosis

UCL is the first WHO UK hub for collaborative TB research and innovation, using expertise from its Institute for Global Health and UCL-TB network to scale up preventative treatment across Europe.

Infectious diseases such as tuberculosis (TB), hepatitis and malaria, cause millions of deaths worldwide each year. Across Europe, more than 27,000 people die prematurely each year due to drug-resistant TB or from TB/HIV co-infection. Nine out of the 30 countries in the region have the highest proportion of antibiotic-resistant TB cases in the world.

To accelerate progress in eliminating TB epidemics worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) has designated the UCL Institute for Global Health (IGH) as a Collaborating Centre for TB Research and Innovation, the first of its kind in the UK. The centre will act as a hub to facilitate research initiatives and activities with the WHO in the European Region, on TB and related challenges such as pandemic preparedness and vaccine development.

Currently there are more than 800 WHO collaborating centres in 80 member states working with WHO on diverse topics from occupational health, communicable diseases and mental health to nutrition and health technologies.

Progress against TB has slowed in recent years due to the COVID pandemic, wars and other humanitarian crises, together with challenges with TB care delivery and medicine supply chains.

“This new partnership is an incredible opportunity to accelerate UCL’s involvement in policy-changing research in tuberculosis that benefits people in the region and globally."

“This new partnership is an incredible opportunity to accelerate UCL’s involvement in policy-changing research in tuberculosis that benefits people in the region and globally,” explains the centre’s Director, Professor Lele Rangaka (UCL IGH). “We are striving to increase the uptake of the latest WHO recommendations on TB prevention, diagnosis, treatment and care towards improved outcomes for people across Europe and beyond.”

To do this, experts within the centre and UCL-TB Network will work with partners to support implementation of WHO programmes and global policy developments. They will also accelerate the implementation of research to scale up TB preventative treatment, including for contacts of people diagnosed with drug-resistant TB, and support capacity-building to improve diagnosis of TB within European countries.

The centre draws on expertise from the UCL IGH and the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL, as well as the UCL-TB network, which is a broad and cross-disciplinary group of experts spanning UCL and partner institutes around the world. It covers research across a wide range of disciplines from basic science to translational medicine and behavioural research.

Work at the centre will help to ensure the goals of the TB Action Plan for the WHO European Region 2023–2030 and the renewed WHO Director-General’s Flagship Initiative on TB are achieved.