Drug discovery in tuberculosis: a molecular approach.

Despite unquestionable success of the combination drug therapy, tuberculosis (TB) very recently has drawn major attention because of the global upsurge of MDR-TB, XDR -TB and HIV-TB co-infection cases. In the last four decades, only one compound is added to the treatment regimen leaving ample opportunities to find out a new generation of TB drugs. The modern concept of drug discovery utilizes the integrated knowledge of genomics, proteomics, molecular biology and systems biology to identify more specific targets. The purpose of this review is to revisit the field of tuberculosis drug discovery based on those new concepts to identify novel targets.