http://goo.gl/e6qOS5
A persistent problem with antibiotic resistance is that patients tend to stop taking antibiotics once they feel better. In these instances, it is possible for some bacteria to survive and then grow impervious to the drugs that fight them.
One advantage of the new drug, called oritavancin, is that it has a long half-life, which allows for a single-dose treatment as the drug will continue working to kill bacteria over the whole treatment period.
"Having a single-dose drug could potentially prevent hospitalizations or reduce the amount of time patients would spend in the hospital," says Dr. G. Ralph Corey, lead author of the study.
To test this, researchers conducted a 3-year study of oritavancin, recruiting nearly 2,000 patients across two trials.