Researchers at ASU and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine are joining forces to ramp up the battle against tuberculosis. They’ll focus on development of new and more accurate and effective methods to diagnose the disease, which is a bacterial infection. It’s a challenging task, explains Jeffrey La Belle, a Fulton Schools assistant professor of biomedical engineering. The problem is that tuberculosis patients can often contract co-infections that results in some symptoms of a disease masking the symptoms of other infectious diseases, making it difficult to correctly diagnose patients’ conditions and prescribe the best treatment, La Belle says.