If Otsuka had been like other companies at the time, these young researchers would have also given up. They were also new to the field and had no clinical successes to show for their work. But because of the suffering they saw in other Asian countries nearby, they knew that one new treatment option would not be enough to help the millions of people who were dying of TB every year.
They had the vision and the foresight to recognize that TB is an extremely tenacious pathogen that finds new ways to attack the human body and resists many forms of antibiotics.