LAUSR

Ranked above HIV/AIDS, it is considered the leading cause of death by a single infectious agent. According to the Global Tuberculosis Report 2020, tuberculosis causes 1.3 million deaths per year [1]. Although the mortality and incidence rates of tuberculosis in Korea have steadily decreased in recent years [2], the management of tuberculosis remains challenging and requires more effective efforts. In clinical settings, inadequate treatment leading to therapeutic failure and drug resistance was reported as a major challenge in tuberculosis management efforts [3,4]. Therefore, precision tuberculosis treatment strategies should be deployed to reach the global tuberculosis control targets. The development of a centralized and cost-effective platform that can improve tuberculosis management is an urgent need. However, recent studies on tuberculosis-related digital technology have focused on diagnostic tools or treatment adherence technologies and have not expressed interest in developing systems that support conducting research and implementing high-precision, personalized treatment [5]. In this article, we introduce a system named the “Center for Personalized Precision Medicine of Tuberculosis: Smart Research and Development Workstation (cPMTb Smart R&D Workstation).” The cPMTb Smart R&D Workstation, which is available at https://smart.cpmtb.kr/, is expected to become a proof-of-concept for data-driven personalized precision tuberculosis treatment. The overall architecture and information technology of the system are illustrated in Figure 1. For data collection and generation, tuberculosis patients receiving treatment with antituberculosis drugs were recruited from each hospital site. Subjects who were prisoners, could not provide voluntary commitment, or were pregnant were excluded. All recruited patients provided written informed consent. A whole blood, plasma, or dried blood spot (DBS) sample of each patient was collected and transferred to the cPMTb laboratory. From those samples, antituberculosis drug concentrations were simultaneously measured using our previously established method [6]. The drug concentrations measured from DBS were converted to plasma drug concentrations using our in-house method. These data play Center for Personalized Precision Medicine for Tuberculosis: Smart Research and Development Workstation