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Emerging therapies

What antibiotic alternatives exist for notoriously resistant non-fermenters? This article explores some therapeutic options.

As mentioned in earlier steps, one of the main difficulties in treating infections caused by NFGNB is that they are resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics.

Emerging therapies to treat NFGNB have come in the form of other antibiotics with little or no known resistance currently.

Antibiotic treatment can be given as monotherapy (a singular agent/antibiotic), or combination antibiotic chemotherapy (a mixture of multiple antibiotics). Though combinational chemotherapy is more expensive and more toxic, it is used to combat a variety of viral, parasitic and mycobacterial infections.

For infections caused by NFGNB, as effective antibiotics rapidly decrease, and multidrug resistant species increase, such combinations of antibiotics are required – despite the toxic side-effects sometimes seen.

These therapies, either mono- or combinational, differ for each particular species of NFGNB. Some specific examples are shown below:

Table of antibiotic chemotherapy (Click here to take a closer look)

If you require a text version of the above image, this is available as a PDF.

The antibiotics listed are not exhaustive. Importantly with the issues of antimicrobial resistance seen for NFGNB infections, as highlighted throughout this course, novel therapies are gaining importance. Such therapies will be discussed further in the next step.