Faster Tuberculosis Culture Medium: How a Parul University Patent Cut TB Growth Time From Weeks to Days

To be precise, Tuberculosis has been identified as a major global public health challenge, affecting millions of people each year across both developed and developing nations. It has been diagnosed and treated for over a century, yet one major challenge remains difficult to overcome: growing the bacteria in a laboratory.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is globally slow to culture, and this delay affects how doctors confirm diagnosis and how quickly treatment can begin. In March 2026, an Indian Patent was granted – IN582831 B1, recognising a faster tuberculosis culture medium that reduces mycobacterial growth time from 6 to 8 weeks by 10 to 14 days.

This innovation is credited to Dr. Vijay Jagdish Upadhye, Deputy Director of the Centre of Research for Development at Parul University. The university is also listed as an applicant for the patent.

The reason this matters is not speed for its own sake. Culture remains the reference standard in TB because it allows live bacteria to be tested directly against drugs, making drug-susceptibility testing possible. A faster culture therefore reduces the delay in confirming not only whether a patient has TB, but also whether the strain will respond to standard treatment.

The deeper explanation of why tuberculosis is so slow to culture is worth reading alongside this, because it explains the challenge this invention aimed to solve.

We cannot change it. We can trigger it. We can boost it. Just as we can boost it for a child.
– Dr. Vijay Jagdish Upadhye

A culture medium is essentially food for bacteria, and organisms, like people, grow better when their nutrition is enriched. Rather than trying to alter the bacterium itself through genetic modification, an approach that could risk changing the very drug-resistance profile the test exists to measure, the team enriched the environment in which the bacteria grow.

Dr. Vijay Upadhye compared it to adding a nutrient supplement to milk, and to the difference between how a child and an older adult absorb food: the organism’s slow pace remains unchanged, but its growth can be accelerated. His analogy was a two-hour journey that cannot be reduced to ten minutes but can potentially be shortened to one hour.

The distinction matters because it accelerates a biological process without overriding it, helping preserve diagnostic accuracy.

The formulation supplements Lowenstein-Jensen medium, the international gold standard for TB culture since the mid-twentieth century, with three growth-promoting compounds, each selected for a specific biological role:

• L-cysteine: An amino acid that acts as a direct building block for protein synthesis, supporting growth pathways already used by the organism.
• Sodium pyruvate: Both an energy source and an oxidising agent that supports aerobic respiration, reducing the metabolic effort required by the bacterium to generate energy and allowing more resources to be used for division.
• Taurine: An amino sulfonic acid that helps regulate nitrogen uptake and assimilation, a pathway directly connected to how quickly an organism can produce the proteins and nucleic acids required for multiplication.

The three additions do not replace the established medium; they supplement it. This is part of why the innovation was patentable as a composition rather than requiring an entirely new culture system. Existing components such as malachite green, which helps suppress faster-growing contaminants, remain in place.

The team conducted twelve rounds of experimentation, varying each nutrient’s concentration and observing colony formation over thirteen to eighteen days. Each experiment was performed in triplicate against both positive and negative controls.

To reduce bias, the team conducted further evaluation by distributing anonymous samples to 4 to 5 laboratories, where analysts were unaware of the complete formulation. This provided additional validation, as independent evaluation is the type of evidence that supports composition-based patent claims.

Individually, each nutrient showed improvement in a dose-dependent manner. However, the combination produced a significant effect. By day thirteen, the fully optimised medium achieved colony counts of around 1,000 compared to just 55 on the standard control, representing an eighteen-fold difference within a two-week period when conventional media would barely show the first signs of growth.

In practical terms, this means moving from examining a plate with unclear early growth to obtaining a denser sample that can be counted, documented, and confidently reported.

Speed is not the only gain. Because traditional MTB cultures need weeks of incubation, there is a long window in which contaminating bacteria or fungi can infiltrate a sample and force the whole test to be discarded and repeated. Narrowing the window from weeks to days narrows the opportunity for contamination, staffing lapses, or equipment failure to compromise a result. That matters most in laboratories that lack extensive high-containment infrastructure, which is a real constraint in much of the country.

A granted patent is closer to a starting gun than a finish line. Dr. Vijay Upadhye described the work as having crossed technology readiness level eight on the nine-point scale used to gauge how close an innovation is to real-world deployment, with conversations underway but full commercial rollout still ahead. The significant point for TB care is the economics: because the medium works by enriching a formula laboratories already use, with inexpensive, readily available components rather than costly instruments, it is well suited to exactly the low-resource settings where TB burden is highest and diagnostic infrastructure thinnest. The person behind it is profiled separately in the story of the Parul University researcher who spent two decades on this problem