Nearly two million people die from tuberculosis (TB) every year. Current antibiotic treatments work slowly; if the TB bacterium isn’t drug resistant, it can take six months for the antibiotics to work and the side effects—nausea and liver toxicity—can be severe. Because of this, many people diagnosed with TB stop treatment early. At the same time, some countries have limited or no access to treatment. Both scenarios mean that the disease is not fully treated, which is how drug-resistant TB develops. TB also can become dormant, making it difficult to diagnose or treat, which can lead to drug resistance.

The research of Dr. Robert Abramovitch, assistant professor with the College of Veterinary Medicine within the affiliated Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, focuses on treating TB in a different, faster way with the goal of reducing drug-resistant TB while creating treatments that are more tolerable.

Abramovitch discovered that artemisinin, a compound derived from the sweet wormwood plant used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat malaria, can block TB dormancy by stopping it from registering low oxygen levels.

“TB goes dormant when it senses a lack of oxygen, so we’re disabling that sensor,” says Abramovitch. “It’s like dandelions. Instead of mowing over TB with an antibiotic, we’re trying to dig it up at the root.”

Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis), which is closely related to the bacterium that causes TB in humans, causes bovine tuberculosis. While bovine TB has been nearly eliminated from the livestock population in the United States, sporadic outbreaks continue to plague producers, leading to expensive quarantines and culling. Wild deer are a major cause of bovine TB outbreaks. In the past, cows passed the disease into the environment, making it endemic in deer. Now, free-roaming deer can pass the disease back to beef and dairy cattle herds.

According to Abramovitch, M. bovis also can establish dormancy, living in the environment and getting into deer through ingestion. It’s possible that the bacterium also can survive in silage and be transmitted to cows through feed, so Abramovitch is working to use the same biosensors in human TB to study M. bovis survival in animal feed.