Two pharmacuetical companies, Entasis Therapeutics together with Astra Zeneca have reason to celebrate. For a long time now we have been talking about the lack of antibiotic options for treating gonorrhea.
Over the last 15 years I have had to make changes to the antibiotic I choose fo gonorrhea several times as it becomes resistant very easily.
But here there are two very interesting publications: one presents data about the use of zoliflodacin, a brand new antibiotic, in the treatment of gonorrhea. Just one single dose produces antibiotic levels truly toxic for this bacteria and was seen to be adequate therapy.
In the other study published this past week in the World Congress of STis & HIV in Chicago, USA, they looked at the genetic makeup of thousands of gonorrhea bacteria samples that had been saved and didn’t find ONE SINGLE GENE that we would normally associate with resistance to this antibiotic. Maybe we finally have a new tretament on the horizon.
Estimating the prevalence of zoliflodacin resistance mutations among a global database of Neisseria gonorrhoeae whole genome sequences. Lin E, Adamson P, Ha S, Klausner J, David Geffen School Of Medicine At UCLA. World Congress of STI HIV, 24th to 26th July 2023, Chicago, Illinois, USA, abstract number 6.