In 2025, the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on Tuberculosis & Lung Health (WHO/GTB) released WHO consolidated guidelines on tuberculosis. Module 4: treatment and care. This module integrates all existing treatment recommendations into a single, unified set of guidelines. Organized into programmatic modules, these guidelines are developed according to WHO’s rigorous standards, drawing on the latest evidence reviews and employing the GRADE methodology to assess the quality of evidence and the strength of each recommendation.
New evidence continues to emerge, and if available and shared, may warrant a new assessment, also contributing to the global knowledge on the use of new regimens for TB treatment. The data on the efficacy and safety of new treatment regimens can be considered for review by the guideline development group. The WHO will commission reviews of relevant evidence on the effect of different treatment regimens on patient-important outcomes.
To support these potential reviews and contribute to a comprehensive global evidence base, WHO is issuing a public call for data. This call invites industry, researchers, national TB programmes, and other agencies to submit suitable datasets to the WHO TB-IPD, where data are curated and securely held by the University College London. For more information on this platform, please visit here.
The current public call is for individual patient data on the following groups:
1. This data should be for those who were treated with one of the following treatment regimens:
2. Individuals with pre-extensively drug-resistant TB (pre-XDR-TB) defined as MDR/RR-TB with additional resistance to fluoroquinolones
This data should be for those who were treated with one of the following treatment regimens:
· BPaL: Bedaquiline, Pretomanid, and Linezolid
· BPaLM: Bedaquiline, Pretomanid, Linezolid, and Moxifloxacin
· BPaLC: Bedaquiline, Pretomanid, Linezolid, and Clofazimine
· BDLC: Bedaquiline, Delamanid, Linezolid, and Clofazimine (for pre-XDR-TB [1])
Eligible datasets can originate from clinical research, operational research, observational studies, or routine programmatic data collection.
To be eligible, datasets must meet the following criteria:
· Include data for at least 25 patients who have completed treatment and for whom a final treatment outcome was assigned, reported according to WHO definitions (Consolidated guidance on tuberculosis data generation and use: module 1: tuberculosis surveillance).
· Baseline drug susceptibility results for rifampicin and fluoroquinolone are strongly preferred (+/- resistance to other group A drugs) using a WHO-recommended method.
· Data should be organized in anonymized, individual records (i.e. one row per treatment episode) for the minimum set of variables, preferably coded in a standard way.
· Datasets are available in a digital format with essential variables, according to the proposed data dictionary and can be shared within the requested period of time (please see below timeline).
More information on the requirements of the datasets, variables, the data dictionary is available here.
Eligible data, in agreement with data owners, will be appended to a Global TB-IPD.
Please let us know by 11 July 2025 if you have data to contribute, by sending email at GTBPCI@who.int and cc Medea Gegia at gegiam@who.int with a subject line ‘’TB individual patient data set’’.
The completed datasets in the requested format should be available, agreed to be shared with WHO via UCL by the data contributor (with a data sharing agreement if necessary) and submitted by 30 July 2025.
[1] Pre-XDR-TB: TB caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) strains that fulfil the definition of MDR/RR-TB and which are also resistant to any fluoroquinolone. XDR-TB: TB caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) strains that fulfil the definition of MDR/RR-TB and which are also resistant to any fluoroquinolone and at least one additional Group A drug. (https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/tuberculosis-extensively-drug-resistant-tuberculosis-(XDR-TB) accessed 23 May 2025