New Family Of Antibacterial Agents Uncovered

Sadly the journal reference isn't freely available.

My first question with these new discoveries is always how much do you need to use to get a reasonable effect.

Doses as low as 0.2 microM were effective, 90% lethality, against some of the tested microorganisms with 0.9 microM effective against all the gram negative drug resistant microorganisms tested. The results with gram positive were not nearly as good requiring an order of magnitude more active compound.

For comparison I found this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19028617?ordinalpos=2&...

If we take the molecular weight for Cefditoren from wikipedia we get a minimum inhibitory concentration (90) of 0.03 mg/L (which is 0.04 microM) to 1 mg/L (1.61 microM).

This isn't my area of expertise and I'm not sure how comparable LD90 and MIC(90) are but it sounds promising.

Let's hope they don't put it in every household product imaginable and exploit it to the point of uselessness, as was done with the previous crop of antibacterial agents.