Mike Frick, Treatment Action Group

As an advocate, it's important that you know how to stay up to date with TB research, as it changes over time. This lesson will introduce two resources for helping you do that. One resource is an annual report called Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends. This report is put out jointly each year by the Stop TB Partnership and Treatment Action Group, where I work. It shows you where funding is coming from and what areas of TB research it's going to. And the report shows annual funding amounts going back to 2005.

So you can look at trends in funding and see how the level of spending on TB has changed, over time. You can see how much funding is going into research specifically into new medicines, diagnostics, and vaccines, as well as spending on TB basic science research and even operational research and implementation science. The report also contains information on funding for research to address the needs of children affected by TB. And we have funding levels for pediatric TB research and reports that go back to 2012.

One of the ways this report is useful for advocacy is that it lets you see how much funding is being invested each year. And you can compare that actual level of spending to the overall amount of funding that is needed to accelerate research to end TB. The overall amount of funding needed for TB research was set by member states of United nations in 2018. They met at a High-Level Meeting on tuberculosis and set political targets and commitments for ending TB. One of these commitments was to fund TB, research and development and member states of the United Nations pledge to give $2B US Dollars a year to TB R&D. Since that time because of underspending, in other words, we haven't met that $2 billion target.

The Stop TB Partnership has said that we now need to spend even more money on TB research each year to make up for that underspending in previous years and accelerate research needed to end TB. That overall funding need in relation to what's actually spent that gap grows wider and wider each year. And it's filling that gap that makes advocacy for TB research so important. You can also see how countries are individually investing in TB research compared to what's considered to be their fair share. The fair share is a set of targets that takes that overall funding amount for TB research, that $2 billion commitment per year, and it breaks it down into what each country should contribute toward meeting that target. So countries that spend more on research and development as a percentage of their overall economic activity should give more to TV research and countries that spend less on research and development can give less. So the United States, for example, has a high individual fair share target for TB research and a smaller country would have a smaller target.

The report published by a Treatment Action Group and Stop TB Partnership shows what countries are actually spending on TB research compared to what their target is. And that's where national advocates can take forward advocacy with parliamentarians and their individual governments to say this distance between actual spending and targeted spending needs to be closed. And you can see how much funding is coming from governments versus other sectors, like philanthropies, the private sector or multi-lateral organizations.

And all of this information is useful to know when developing advocacy campaigns for TB research. You will go deep into this resource throughout the course. The other resource we want to look at is a report developed by communities affected by TB. It's called "Deadly Divide: TB Commitments Versus TB Realities". This report includes a chapter on accelerating the development of and access to new TB tools. This resource is important because it identifies some of the key barriers that are slowing down progress in TV research, aside from the lack of funding. This report, Deadly Divide, also lays out key actions that affected communities are calling for in order to move progress forward much faster and accelerate research and development. The Deadly Divide report is also useful for advocacy because it shows you the kinds of campaigns that communities are leading to develop and get access to new TB tools.

As a longtime advocate for TB research, I can say that we definitely need more company in this activity. And the addition of more advocates calling for TB research and development, working alongside those of us who have come this far will be necessary to get to where we want to go, which is an end to tuberculosis. We need new tools to end TB and to get those new tools, we need the voices of people who have survived TB, been affected by it, or feel a commitment to ending it. Joining the TB research and development advocacy movement is a way to get involved in ending TB in your community. And although the scientific information, the knowledge and the learning curve to do advocacy on TB research can feel steep. There are lots of people here who can help you climb that learning curve get involved in a CAB or other advocacy efforts and make a real contribution toward bringing forward the science. We need to end this epidemic.