LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Antibiotics: Resistances
built 675 days ago
Sutcliffe brings 26 years of experience in the discovery and design of new antibiotics, with particular emphasis on understanding and overcoming antibiotic resistance. She joined the NanoBio team from Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, where she served as vice president of biology and chief research scientist.
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Not all antibiotics are equally affected by beta-lactamases. Augmentin (amoxicillin/clavulanate potassium), which has just gained U.S regulatory clearance for use in a more convenient, twice-a-day dosing regimen, has been expressly designed to overcome this type of resistance. The compound combines amoxicillin, an extended-spectrum antibiotic, with clavulanate, which inactivates beta lactamases and ... protects amoxicillin from destruction.
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It is especially important to take antibiotics as prescribed. Patients should not skip doses nor stop using the medication as soon as they feel better. Doing so may allow some of the bacteria to remain and possibly become resistant to the medication. When the bacteria become resistant to the medication, a condition known as antibiotic resistance develops.
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The greatest danger occurs if the human pathogens are resistant to antibiotics. When assessing prevalence of resistance, the FDA would want information in both human pathogens and nonpathogenic bacteria. Antibiotic resistance can develop in bacteria that do not cause human illness and, in some circumstances, these nonpathogenic bacteria may transfer their genes for drug resistance to bacteria that cause human diseases.
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Appropriate prescribing ... means that physicians use "narrow spectrum" antibiotics--those that target only a few bacterial types--whenever possible, so that resistances can be restricted. The only national survey of antibiotic prescribing practices of office physicians, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, finds that the number of prescriptions has not risen appreciably from 1980 to 1992, but there has been a shift to using costlier, broader spectrum agents. This prescribing trend heightens the resistance problem, write McCaig and Hughes, because more diverse bacteria are being exposed to antibiotics.
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The first of these new antibiotics, linezolid (Zyvox®), was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on 19 April 2000. It is effective against many Gram-positive bacteria that have developed resistance to the older antibiotics.
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