The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation yesterday unveiled Dollars 104m in fresh grants to the TB Alliance, a non-profit tuberculosis drug development group, in a move that could lead to the development of a new generation of treatments by 2012.

The support will trigger the start of a ground-breaking system of combining innovative drugs on a single clinical trial in an initiative that could have far-reaching implications for the development of other drugs.

"This is really breaking new ground," said Maria Freire, president and chief executive of the TB Alliance. "The idea of putting something into combination trials could be trailblazing."

Traditionally, regulatory requirements and competitive concerns between rival companies have meant that new treatments are developed consecutively, with a single new drug added to existing combinations that have already been proven to work.

However, the TB Alliance plans to begin laboratory tests this summer that will combine two new drugs - Bayer's antibiotic moxifloxacin and Chiron's PA824 - with existing anti-tuberculosis medicines.

It is also gearing up for co-operation with another large drug company, with several other pharmaceutical groups, including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis, researching medicines that could prove important in speeding cures for TB.

The move towards combination trials represents the fulfilment of a radical new approach by the TB Alliance, and is aided by the fact that current tuberculosis treatments were established before modern regulatory procedures tightened standards on how to test combination therapies.

The technique is starting to be used in the development of drugs for treating HIV, but is constrained by tensions between rival companies competing to provide therapies that they own.

It is also likely to prove important for research in the development of treatments for diseases such as malaria that already require combination therapies rather than the use of a single drug in order to avoid the rapid emergence of resistance.

Eight million people are infected and two million die each year from TB, largely in the developing world, where low incomes mean there has been little incentive for commercial drug companies to develop drugs, diagnostics and vaccines.