“The science exists. Our job is to make sure it reaches the people who need it,” — Prof Violet Chihota, Aurum Group Chief Scientific Officer and Principal Investigator of DriveDx4TB TOO.
For Hannie Stevenson, getting a TB diagnosis changed her life. A TB survivor and member of Aurum’s Community Advisory Board, Hannie had grown up believing she had bronchitis. It was only later that she discovered she had TB.
“As a TB survivor, I learned that early diagnosis changed my life, because I grew up knowing that I had bronchitis, only to find it was TB all along.”
Hannie’s experience reflects a much larger challenge. Too many people with TB are still missed because the tests they need are not available where they seek care, or because existing tests require sputum samples that some people, particularly children, cannot easily provide. When TB is diagnosed late, treatment can be delayed, people can become more ill and transmission can continue.
DriveDx4TB TOO is responding to this gap. Funded by Unitaid, the project brings together global and local partners across South Africa, Kenya and Indonesia to accelerate the introduction of innovative TB diagnostic technologies in real-world settings. The aim is not simply to evaluate new tests, but to generate the evidence needed to help the right tools reach the people who need them.
TB does not look the same in every community, and neither should the approach to diagnosing it.
Someone being screened in a community may have very different needs from someone attending a primary healthcare clinic or hospital. DriveDx4TB TOO is therefore evaluating different diagnostic technologies and generating evidence on how they can work across these settings.
But developing better tests is only part of the challenge. The project is also looking at the systems and partnerships needed to move promising diagnostics from research into routine care, including evidence to inform policy, regulatory pathways and approaches that can support sustainable access.
Communities need to be part of that process too. As Blossom Napoleon, Aurum’s Community Engagement Manager, explains it: “It is important that we work with civil society organisations that are rooted within these communities to generate quality evidence, to shape global and national policy, that make life-saving TB testing available to everyone that needs it, especially children and people living with HIV. We need to centre community-based organisations and communities to lead the change.”
That connection between science and lived experience is central to the project. Hannie’s own experience makes the urgency difficult to ignore. “Neither TB nor MDR-TB is a death sentence, but a late diagnosis is.” Her message is simple but effective. “Test early, start early, and finish early.”
In a difficult global funding environment, DriveDx4TB TOO represents a new investment in closing one of TB’s most persistent gaps. For Aurum, it also builds on years of experience in TB research and implementation, bringing science, communities and health systems together to help promising technologies move closer to the people who need them.
“We are accelerating diagnostics because people cannot wait anymore. We need the tools now. We need better tools now,” says Violet.
The project is still at the beginning of its journey. Its impact will ultimately be measured not simply by the technologies evaluated, but by whether better diagnostic options reach the communities that need them.