Lack Of New Drugs To Fight Resistant Infections

New drugs to fight bacterial infections resistant to current medications are at least two years away from general use, according to researchers speaking at the American Chemical Society's fall meeting, held in Orlando, Florida, last month.

Robin Cooper of Lilly Research Laboratories noted that with no current available therapy for treating vancomycin-resistant bacteria, there is a crisis in infectious disease management. Vancomycin-resistant enterococci now account for up to 15% of in-hospital infections, he said, and other antibiotics are useless. As many as 50% of patients are resistant to erythromycin, and 90% of those patients infected with Staphylococcus aureus are resistant to methinillin. Even more threatening, according to Mr Cooper, is the possible development of a vancomycin-resistant staphylococcus.

On the positive side, he said that Lilly researchers have chemically manipulated a potential drug, put on the shelf when vancomycin was discovered, to create a new formulation - LY33328. It is a more potent killer of bacteria than vancomycin, and is effective against VRE strains in both the test tube and in laboratory animals, according to Mr Cooper, who expects the drug to begin Phase I clinical testing this year.