A Novel Antimicrobial Agent Joins the Battle against Resistant Bacteria

Lately, the medical news has featured a disturb-ing number of reports of the inexorable devel-opment of bacterial resistance to almost all avail-able antimicrobial agents (1, 2). Whereas resistant gram-negative bacteria were a major problem in the 1970s, the past decade has seen a crescendo of problems with multidrug-resistant gram-positive bac-teria, including methicillin-resistant staphylococci, pen-icillin-resistant pneumococci, and vancomycin-resis-tant enterococci (3). The latter are particularly vexing because several strains of vancomycin-resistant enterococci (especially Enterococcus faecium) are re-sistant to all available antibiotics (4). In the past, the solution to the problem of bacterial resistance has depended primarily on the development of novel antimicrobial agents. However, this approac