Antibacterial Drug Discovery in the Age of Resistance
Andrew B. Benowitz, David J Payne, Jennifer L. Hoover · Microbe Magazine · 2010
The lack of new antibacterials for the treatment of serious infections has been broadly recognized as a major unmet medical need for at least a decade. A recent survey of 96 intensive care doctors across Europe showed that 50% have treated at least one patient with a gram-negative pathogen that was totally or almost totally resistant to all antibiotics during the previous six months. This is a dire predicament, as it is expected that no entirely novel mechanism agent for the treatment of gram-negative infections will be launched before 2015. Furthermore, recent experience with H1N1 pandemic influenza emphasizes the urgency of the situation, as bacterial coinfection with MRSA was implicated in a surprising proportion of fatalities. This phenomenon is especially worrying, since few oral treatment options exist for MRSA pneumonia.