Comprehensive Resistance Prediction for Tuberculosis: an International Consortium (CRyPTIC)
About the project
CRyPTIC’s aim was to help improve control of tuberculosis and facilitate WHO’s End TB Strategy by better, faster and more targeted treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis via genetic resistance prediction, paving the way towards universal drug susceptibility testing (DST).
Our ultimate goal was to achieve sufficiently accurate genetic prediction of resistance to most anti-tuberculosis drugs, so that whole genome sequencing can replace culture-based DST for TB. This will enable rapid-turnaround near-to-patient assays to revolutionise MDR-TB identification and management. This project was funded by MRC Newton Fund, Wellcome Trust, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It ran from 2016-2021 and was led by Professor Derrick Crook, University of Oxford.
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RESPECT-TB launched!
A new international programme, funded by Wellcome, will study multi-drug resistance tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in five countries; India, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, South Africa and Vietnam. RESPECT-TB will investigate the population level prevalence of resistance to the new drugs used to treat MDR-TB, as well as asking why and how this resistance develops by combining genomic sequencing, laboratory…
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New dataset released (v3.4.1)
A new version of the CRyPTIC dataset (v3.4.1) has been made available on Zenodo today; it adds 53,916 VCF files and 53,975 FASTA files to the dataset, all the data tables are unchanged. For more information please see the Datasets page.
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New CRyPTIC datasets
The original CRyPTIC publications were based on a dataset resulting from a data freeze in April 2020. This dataset (v1.1.1) could be downloaded via an FTP site. Since then the consortium has continued to receive additional samples and data from its members and there have been a number of improvements to how both the genetic…
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CRyPTIC ECOFF/ECV paper attracts two letters
The paper we, as a consortium, published last year in Eur Rest J, described the ECOFF/ECV values we had determined for research use. The Editor received two letters about our paper which you can read here and here. Our response is here.
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Two new publications: Data compendium and GWAS
These two papers, just published in PLoS Biology, are amongst the primary research outputs of the CRyPTIC project. The first, entitled “A data compendium associating the genomes of 12,289 Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates with quantitative resistance phenotypes to 13 antibiotics” describes in detail the large dataset of clinical tuberculosis isolates collected by CRyPTIC, including examining the probability of a sample…
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CRyPTIC papers covered by CIDRAP
The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) has written a news story on the two CRyPTIC papers recently published in PLoS Biology. Click here to read more.
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New publication: BashTheBug!
We enlisted citizen scientists to help us classify the many thousands of photographs of the different samples of M. tuberculosis collected by CRyPTIC growing on different concentrations of antibiotics by launching the BashTheBug project on the Zooniverse platform back in April 2017. In this paper, published in eLife, we investigate how to form a consensus from the many classifications made by the volunteers and…
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Interview on the BBC World Service
You can hear the CRyPTIC Principal Investigator, Prof Derrick Crook, talking about the project and its impact on tuberculosis on News Hour on the BBC World Service here. The segment starts about 35 minutes in. You will need a BBC login so this link may not work for everyone.
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Read in the Economist about CRyPTIC
Hot on the heels of the press release, the Economist have published an article describing the work of the CRyPTIC project. Note that it is behind a pay wall, but you can always buy a copy of the print edition when it comes out on Friday 23 October 2021!