ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the tangible advances in the development of drugs that are in or shortly to enter clinical development. Fluoroquinolones therefore appear not to have sufficient activity against persister bacteria to reduce treatment to less than 6 months and are now only being evaluated as part of treatment regimens for tuberculosis resistant to first-line drugs. Current work is now focusing on whether stratification of patients from these trials is able to identify an easy-to-treat phenotype that may be amenable to a 4-month regimen. The use of fluoroquinolones could be compromised in the future by the emergence of drug resistance. The development of faropenem, a structurally similar compound that has been modified for oral administration, has displayed bactericidal activity against M. tuberculosis in vitro even in the absence of clavulanic acid, and offers a more practical option than other drugs in the class that require parenteral administration.
