Inside the body, tuberculosis is skilled in guerrilla warfare.

When TB infects the body, its bacteria are surrounded by cells that form granulomas, which keep the bacteria in check but also provide them places to hide from the immune system.

The results are regular skirmishes, with the bacteria working to infect the body and the body working to keep them under wraps.

But each year, 9 million new cases of TB are diagnosed and nearly 2 million people worldwide succumb to its ability to flourish in this biological version of hide-and-seek.

So the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is taking steps to help doctors better understand the potentially deadly disease and develop a more efficient means of treatment.

The foundation has awarded a $11.4 million grant to the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research, among other research groups, to develop new strategies to control TB.

In anticipation of the grant, Pitt has refined nuclear imaging technology in hopes of tracking the bacteria in real time. The plan is to watch how the disease progresses and how existing drugs affect it, with the ultimate goal of developing a more efficient treatment regimen.

Although curable, TB requires a six-month regimen of four drugs. In underdeveloped countries, the long treatment regimen can be too expensive to help everyone with the disease, leading to widespread death. When drugs aren't available for full treatment, resistant strains of TB also can emerge.

The Pitt team is using three imaging technologies -- radionuclides, fluorescence and mass spectrometry -- to develop imaging probes and techniques to locate bacteria associated with TB, and watch their progression and how drugs affect them, a Pitt news release states.

Dr. JoAnne Flynn, the grant's principal investigator and a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Pitt's School of Medicine, said the goal is to reduce the time and expense of TB treatments. Current medications were developed more than three decades ago.

Dr. Flynn, who's been studying TB for 18 years, said she and her research team will watch the disease progress in animals. Ideally, the team hopes, for the first time, to get real-time images of the bacteria in action.

The newly developed imaging technology also could be useful to test vaccines.

TB is a bacterial disease usually affecting the lungs. Called pulmonary TB, the disease is characterized by a persistent cough, shortness of breath, weight loss and chest pain. Left untreated, one person with active pulmonary TB will infect an average of 10 to 15 others each year. Deadly if left untreated, the bacteria also can infect nearly any part of the body, the release states.