Tuberculosis (TB) has been a disease for centuries with various challenges [1]. Like
other places where challenges and opportunities come together, TB challenges were
the inspiration for the scientific community to mobilize different groups for the
purpose of interest. For example, with the emergence of drug resistance, there has
been a huge volume of research on the discovery of new medicines and drug
delivery methods and the repurposing of old drugs [2, 3]. Moreover, to enhance the
capacity to detect TB cases, studies have sought diagnostics and biomarkers, with
much hope recently expressed in the direction of point-of-care tests [4].
Despite all such efforts as being highlighted in 50 Chapters of this volume, we
are still writing about TB and thinking about how to fight this old disease–implying
that the problem of TB might be complex, so calling the need for an integrated
science to deal with multiple dimensions in a simultaneous and effective manner.
We are not the first one; there have been proposed integrated platform for TB
research, integrated prevention services, integrated models for drug screening,
integrated imaging protocol, integrated understanding of the disease pathogenesis,
integrated control models, integrated mapping of the genome of the pathogen, etc.
[5–12], to name some.
These integrated jobs date back decades ago. So, a question arises: why is there a
disease named TB yet? It might be due to the fact that this integration has happened
to a scale that is not global, and so TB remains to be a problem, especially in
resource-limited settings.
Hope Tuberculosis: Integrated Studies for a Complex Disease helps to globalize
the integrated science of TB.
