Early initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) during TB therapy substantially reduces TB-related morbidity and mortality rates for coinfected patients (2, 3), and the World Health Organization recommends that ART be started as soon as possible but within 8 weeks after the initiation of TB therapy (4). Simultaneously, the global emergence and increased dissemination of multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB have increased the need for novel anti-TB drugs with new mechanisms of action. Data from Eastern Europe indicate that multidrug resistance is approximately twice as common among patients with TB who have HIV, compared with patients without HIV (5), and a South African study found that 100% of patients with XDR-TB who were tested had HIV infections (6). Ensuring access to novel anti-TB compounds and determining safe and efficacious doses for coinfected patients must be priorities (7).The diarylquinoline bedaquiline (BDQ) (previously called TMC207) was recently approved for the treatment of MDR-TB and XDR-TB by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency. The mechanism of action is novel and involves the inhibition of mycobacterial ATP synthase, leading to disrupted energy metabolism (8, 9). Phase II trials showed that BDQ significantly decreased the time to sputum culture conversion and increased the proportion of patients with negative culture results after 6 months of treatment, when added to a regimen of other anti-TB drugs (10,11). This treatment benefit was sustained at the end of the 120-week trial (12). The exposure-response relationship for BDQ is poorly characterized, but a recent study of early bactericidal activity detected a linear increase in bactericidal activity with increasing doses over 14 days of treatment (13). The main safety issue for BDQ is moderate QT prolongation; in addition, an unexplained increase in late deaths, compared to the placebo group, was observed in one phase II study in which all patients also received standard MDR-TB treatment, which resulted in a black-box warning in the U.S. label (12,14). In general, however, BDQ is better tolerated than other second-line TB drugs, the majority of which produce clinically significant and often treatment-limiting side effects (15). The current standard dosing regimen for BDQ is 2 weeks of 400 mg given daily, followed by 22 weeks of 200 mg administered three times per week. BDQ is extensively distributed to the tissues and has a multiphasic elimination pattern with a long terminal half-life (4 to 5 months) (16,17). It is mainly metabolized by the cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzyme CYP3A4 to a N-monodesmethyl metabolite, M2 (38). The activity of M2 against Mycobacterium tuberculosis is 3-to 6-fold weaker than the activity of BDQ, and there is concern that the metabolite may have a higher risk of toxicity (39). M2, though, circulates at much lower concentrations than the parent drug in humans. M2 is further primarily demethylated to the M3 metabolite, likely also by CYP3A4 (11,18).Ne...