The finding is important because no new TB drug has been discovered in the last 40 years, though the disease kills one human every 15 seconds somewhere on the earth (one third of the world’s population) despite 130 years of intense medical research. BCG, the only vaccine against TB, works only on children with limited efficacy.

Scientists from the Institute of Life Sciences, at the University of Hyderabad have worked out the mechanism of iron uptake for Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bug causing TB.

Iron uptake and its regulation inside the cells is a central survival mechanism for the TB bug and is, therefore, a promising target for intervention. However, the bottleneck so far was absence of understanding of the mechanism of iron acquisition and transport in the bacterium.

The Indian research team has accomplished this challenging task. It elucidates how a complicated inter-play of three proteins helps the bug import iron from outside of the cell, in which it lives.

“Iron is critical to the pathogen’s survival. Blocking the pathway will make the bug less virulent and eventually kill them,” team leader Dr Seyed E Hasnain told Deccan Herald.

Published in this week’s issue of the Public Library of Sciences, the discovery shows how the TB bacillus survives in low iron environment. Since the bacteria cannot synthesise iron of their own, they are desperate to get it from outside as the metal is critical for their survival. “They grab iron from wherever it is available,” Dr Hasnain said.Though it has been thrown open the drug development field, he cautioned that the process might take some years because the task is not easy and funding support is not generous.

“More windows have been opened to enter and tackle this organism, but certainly there is a long way to go,” Dr V M Katoch who heads the National JALMA Institute for Leprosy in Agra said.