Antibiotic clinical trials - the Witley Park Symposium

Abstract

There has been an increasing use of antibiotics in all areas of medicine. This has been associated with increasing resistance, both within, and now more worryingly, between drug classes, both in hospitals and in the community [1,2]. In the face of these developments, it is of major concern that there have been no totally new classes of antibiotics with novel modes of action commercialized since 1961 [3]. In most infections, the magnitude of the effect of resistance on patient outcomes is poorly understood [1], yet advertisements in medical journals make frequent use of resistance surveillance data, backing up the fear of failure. Promotion of new antibiotics by the pharmaceutical industry is proving effective in changing doctors' prescribing habits, almost always from low-cost agents, such as penicillin or erythromycin, to high-cost agents, such as the newer cephalosporins, fluoroquinolones, and macrolides.