Word: daptomycin
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Other companies are starting to look for fresh new antimicrobial agents. Cubist, in Cambridge, Mass., has an injectable form of one such agent--daptomycin--in late-stage clinical trials. Like tetracycline, it was derived from filamentous bacteria that dwell in both soil and water. But daptomycin does not work as tetracycline does by inhibiting cellular metabolism. Rather, it disrupts the conformation of the bacterium's cell membrane, more like penicillin. The way daptomycin does this appears to be unique; in other words, the resistance that disease-causing bacteria have developed to penicillin should not readily transfer to daptomycin...
...Both daptomycin and linezolid (branded under the trade names Cidecin and Zyvox) are aimed at drug-resistant enterococci and staphylococci, which have ballooned into a huge problem for nursing homes and hospitals. But while that is the most attractive commercial market, a number of American pharmaceutical companies are also participating in private-public partnerships aimed at resolving the global health crisis created by drug-resistant malaria and TB. At present, neither disease is a tremendous problem in the U.S. or Western Europe, but that happy situation may not last forever, especially where TB is concerned. In 1992, at the height...
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