First, thank-you biomaven for your welcome and response...
quidditch made execellent, accurate points about the hidden costs of Vancomycin therapy for bone infections, soft tissue infections....it's been my experience as well(I once did part-time work for one of those home infusion therapy co's which is what ignited my enthusiasm over the PR...more so than for the critical care setting....
The PR gave enough info, but not enough to draw broad conclusions...I have worked in the PEDI ICU in Boston(currently pursuing other paths)...
Without reading the actual study, I am encouraged since vanco resistance is indeed steadily increasing...The link below published late 2003 describes a vanco resistant incident in Hershey, PA...that's quite scary...dalbavancin is a next generation in the vanco class and lab studies confirm it's superiour action...and is one of the drugs listed as having had activity in this resistant organism...among many other competitors...can't stress how fierce the competition is in this area...
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Regarding the P2 that MICU reported this week...Even cather infections take 6-8 weeks to clear...they measured activity at week 3...they did not quantify anything else in the PR...such as the condition of the patients in the 2 arms(immunocompromised status), age, disease etc and importantly the quantity of micro activity...so my
enthusiasm dampened when I probed further...
For disclosure, I own no shares and found out about it on the SI boards...
As another poster suggested, my BIG concern is it's long-half life and how it will impact possible deleterious renal side effects, since standard vanco has much shorter half-life...I couldn't find any long term studies in the pubmed search...
I'd feel more comfortable investing if I knew this data...
But, MICU has much in the pipeline which can't be discounted....again, in a very competitive area...
Hope this helps somewhat...
Zeta |
