TB Alliance: Accelerating Access to TB Treatment

TB Alliance (TBA) is a not-for-profit product-development partnership (PDP) that leverages a global network of public and private partners to advance TB drug development as efficiently as possible for underserved markets. The case follows TBA as it prepares a next-generation TB regimen, Ultra, and seeks to compress the historic ~9-year access timeline to ≤1 year by orchestrating evidence, policy, procurement, training, and community pull. Current challenges include bottlenecks in market access and falling donations from global donors.

The primary pedagogical objective of this case is to help students develop a strategic framework for accelerating the delivery and adoption of breakthrough health innovations in complex global settings. Using the TB Alliance’s planned launch of Ultra as the focal challenge, students are invited to move beyond product innovation and engage with the broader implementation problem: how to translate a scientifically transformative treatment into rapid, population-level impact. The case is designed to strengthen students’ ability to analyse systemic barriers to scale, such as regulatory pathways, stakeholder alignment, and operational bottlenecks across multiple countries, and to formulate strategic options that address these barriers through coordinated, cross-border mechanisms. In doing so, students learn to distinguish between scientific success and implementation success, and to appreciate why the latter can often be the decisive factor in global health outcomes.
A second objective is to build students’ capacity for decision-making under uncertainty in multi-stakeholder environments where public, private, and non-profit actors must collaborate. The case encourages students to compare distinct strategic pathways by evaluating trade-offs across speed, cost, political feasibility, scalability, and long-term sustainability. In particular, it prompts critical thinking about innovative business models and ecosystem leadership that can accelerate adoption in high-burden countries. More broadly, the case aims to develop transferable insights into scaling innovation in emerging markets and resource-constrained settings, making it relevant not only to global health and social impact courses but also to strategy, innovation, and public–private partnership contexts.