1. J Antimicrob Chemother. 2015 Aug;70(8):2177-81. doi: 10.1093/jac/dkv157. Epub
2015 Jun 10.

Reviving old antibiotics.

Theuretzbacher U(1), Van Bambeke F(2), Cantón R(3), Giske CG(4), Mouton JW(5),
Nation RL(6), Paul M(7), Turnidge JD(8), Kahlmeter G(9).

Author information: 
(1)Center for Anti-Infective Agents, Vienna, Austria utheuretzbacher@cefaia.com. 
(2)Pharmacologie cellulaire et moléculaire, Louvain Drug Research Institute,
Université catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium. (3)Servicio de
Microbiología, Hospital Universitario Ramón y Cajal and Instituto Ramón y Cajal
de Investigación Biomédica (IRYCIS), Madrid, Spain. (4)Clinical Microbiology,
L2:02, Karolinska University Hospital, Solna, Stockholm, Sweden Department of
Laboratory Medicine (LABMED), Division of Clinical Microbiology, Karolinska
Institutet, Huddinge, Sweden. (5)Department of Medical Microbiology and
Infectious Diseases Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Department of Medical 
Microbiology, Radboudumc Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. (6)Drug
Delivery, Disposition and Dynamics, Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, 
Monash University, Parkville, Victoria, Australia. (7)Division of Infectious
Diseases, Rambam Health Care Campus and Faculty of Medicine, Technion - Israel
Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. (8)School of Biological Sciences,
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. (9)Department of
Clinical Microbiology, Central Hospital, Växjö, Sweden Department of Medical
Sciences, Division of Clinical Bacteriology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.

In the face of increasing antimicrobial resistance and the paucity of new
antimicrobial agents it has become clear that new antimicrobial strategies are
urgently needed. One of these is to revisit old antibiotics to ensure that they
are used correctly and to their full potential, as well as to determine whether
one or several of them can help alleviate the pressure on more recent agents.
Strategies are urgently needed to 're-develop' these drugs using modern
standards, integrating new knowledge into regulatory frameworks and communicating
the knowledge from the research bench to the bedside. Without a systematic
approach to re-developing these old drugs and rigorously testing them according
to today's standards, there is a significant risk of doing harm to patients and
further increasing multidrug resistance. This paper describes factors to be
considered and outlines steps and actions needed to re-develop old antibiotics so
that they can be used effectively for the treatment of infections.

© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British 
Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. All rights reserved. For Permissions,
please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

PMID: 26063727  [PubMed - in process]