The ten-year plan aims to prevent 14 million tuberculosis deaths across the world using a revolutionary vaccine, a new drug regimen and grassroots community work.
The Global Plan to Stop Tuberculosis was unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and is backed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and a wide range of countries, organisations and public and private donors.
If implemented the plan would meet the United Nation's Millennium Goal of halting, and then reversing, the spread of TB by 2015.
But the plan faces likely funding needs of US$31 billion to meet its lofty target.
"Every 15 seconds someone dies of tuberculosis," Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown said as the plan was launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
He promised to put support for the plan on the agenda of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised countries finance ministers at an upcoming meeting in Moscow.
Microsoft boss Bill Gates committed his charity to triple funding against tuberculosis from US$300 million to more than US$900 million by 2015.
"Although it is almost eliminated in rich countries, it's still one of the biggest killers worldwide," Mr Gates told a press conference. "This is a very tough disease."
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, head of the most populous country in Africa, the most TB-afflicted continent, joined Mr Brown and Mr Gates in urging business and political leaders to back the new program.
President Obasanjo acknowledged that African countries had to play their role: "We must also contribute whatever we can to ensure that the effort succeeds."
The plan aims to improve access to treatment, develop the first new TB drugs in 40 years as well as a vaccine to replace one in use since the early 1900s and new diagnostic tools.
Despite the availability of affordable, effective treatment, each year there are nine million new TB cases and nearly two million TB deaths worldwide, according to the WHO.
The consortium behind the plan, Stop TB Partnership, says the first phase of its campaign, which ran from 2001 to 2005, more than doubled the number of people placed on the so-called DOTS treatment strategy and helped India and China -- where TB is widespread -- spot nearly 70 percent of TB cases.
The heart of DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Short Course) intervention is to have care-workers closely monitor patients to ensure they complete a short course of powerful drugs.
Patients with TB often fail to stick to a drug regimen right to the end after their symptoms disappear causing surviving TB germs to rebound, opening the way for a relapse and the rise of resistant strains.
TB is caused by a germ called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It usually affects the lungs but can sometimes infect the lymph nodes, kidneys, brain or spine.
Millions of people carry the germ but do not develop the disease, and can still infect others.
On the other hand, the disease can swiftly develop among people whose immune systems have been damaged by HIV, which is why tuberculosis is the leading direct cause of death among people with AIDS.