Theravance releases strong new ATLAS data on telavancin

The USA's Theravance has released positive additional data from its ATLAS 1 and ATLAS 2 studies assessing the safety and efficacy of telavancin, its rapidly bactericidal injectable antibiotic with multiple mechanisms of action, in the treatment of complicated skin and skin structure infections caused by Gram-positive bacteria.

The data, which were presented at the third International Symposium on Resistant Gram-Positive Infections, held in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, came from two large, multicenter, multinational, double-blind, randomized clinical studies that enrolled and treated 1,867 patients, 719 of whom were infected with methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

According to the US drugmaker, the primary efficacy endpoint of non-inferiority in the clinical cure rate at the follow-up visit, comparing telavancin to vancomycin, was achieved in both studies, and the rates of clinical cure, microbiological eradication, and overall therapeutic response for telavancin compared favorably to those for vancomycin, while for patients with MRSA, clinical cure rates, microbiologic eradication rates and overall therapeutic response favored telavancin over vancomycin.