Funding for tuberculosis research fell $US1.3 billion ($A1.81 billion) short of global targets last year, threatening worldwide goals to eliminate the disease between 2030 and 2035, researchers say.
The Treatment Action Group (TAG), an independent think tank, said the $US674 million of total funding in 2014 amounted to just a third of the $2 billion experts say is needed per year for research and development to rid the world of TB.
The need for better ways to prevent, diagnose and treat TB has never been greater as it is now the leading cause of death from an infectious disease, responsible for more deaths per year than AIDS, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) data.
"Anything short of a massive and sustained infusion of money into TB research will jeopardise our chances of meeting global goals," Mark Harrington, executive director of TAG, said in a statement.
TB death rates have dropped 47 per cent since 1990 but the highly infectious, airborne disease still kills 4000 people every day.
Progress is threatened by the emergence of drug-resistant strains which are outpacing the development of new drugs and are hard to diagnose and treat.
In 2014, 480,000 people developed multidrug-resistant TB, according to WHO data.
The WHO has called for achieving a world free of TB by 2035, an aspiration reaffirmed by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by world leaders last September, which include a target to end TB by 2030.
Modest gains in TB research and development funding from 2005 to 2009 have stagnated in the five years since then, according to TAG's research.
An exodus of pharmaceutical companies from TB research since 2012 has left the field dependent on public and philanthropic organisations for support, TAG said.
"We won't eliminate TB unless we accelerate research and development," said Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership.
Ditiu urged the BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - to lead a financial push for research and development.
They accounted for 46 per cent of the world's new TB cases and 40 per cent of TB-related deaths in 2014, but for only 3.6 per cent of public funding, according to TAG.
