Abstract
What is this summary about?
Bacterial pneumonia is an infection of the lung caused by bacteria that is potentially deadly, costly, and affects millions of people worldwide every year. Treatment is becoming more challenging—many current treatments no longer work well because some strains of bacteria that cause pneumonia have become resistant to current antibiotics. Many of the antibiotics that do still work have undesirable side effects. Therefore, new antibiotics that work differently are needed to treat bacterial pneumonia.
Lefamulin (brand name, Xenleta®) is an antibiotic that was approved to treat bacterial pneumonia caught outside a hospital (also called community-acquired bacterial pneumonia, or CABP) based on results of two clinical studies. In both studies, participants started treatment with lefamulin before the type of bacteria causing the infection was known. Lefamulin was well tolerated and worked well in 5 to 7 days to kill the bacteria causing the infection and to improve symptoms in almost all participants with CABP.
What were the results?
After the studies were completed, the researchers looked back at what kinds of bacteria were identified from the study participants. Lefamulin worked well to kill bacteria and to improve CABP symptoms for most kinds of infecting bacteria, including bacteria resistant to many current antibiotics.
What do the results mean?
These results suggest that lefamulin, by itself, provides a much-needed treatment option for CABP that covers most of the key bacteria causing this infection.
Keywords: : Antibiotic, antibiotic resistance, bacterial pneumonia, infection, lay summary, lefamulin, plain language summary, pleuromutilin, pneumonia
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Acknowledgements
The authors and sponsor would like to thank the patients, their families and caregivers, the investigators, and the investigational site staff from the LEAP 1 and LEAP 2 studies.
Footnotes
Financial disclosure
Drs Paukner and Gelone are employees of/stockholders in Nabriva Therapeutics plc. Dr Moran has received grants from ContraFect and Nabriva Therapeutics. Dr Sandrock has served as a consultant for Allergan and Nabriva Therapeutics, received grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Health Resources & Services Administration, and received nonfinancial support from the State of California. Dr File was an investigator for the LEAP 1 trial, for which his institution received a research grant, and has served as a consultant for Nabriva Therapeutics. Dr Vidal has received grants or research contracts from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinta Therapeutics, MSD, Nabriva Therapeutics, the National Institutes of Health, and Pfizer.
Dr Waites has received research grants and/or contracts from Akonni Biosystems, Covance, Inc., Everest Pharmaceuticals, mFluiDx, Roche Molecular Systems, SpeeDx, Ltd., US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Wockhardt Ltd. Dr Yu is an employee of Becton, Dickinson & Company, which was contracted to perform microbiological analyses for Nabriva Therapeutics, and owns stock in Becton, Dickinson & Company. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.
Editorial assistance and medical writing support for development of this publication were provided by Morgan C. Hill, PhD, ISMPP CMPP™, an employee of ICON (Blue Bell, PA, USA) and were funded by Nabriva Therapeutics.
Open access
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