Program Description With antimicrobial resistance on the rise and very few new pharmaceutical agents in development, a well-managed antimicrobial stewardship program in the hospital becomes the first-line defense against the emergence of resistance and provides not only a cost-containment measure but also ensures the continued efficacy of available antimicrobials. A successful stewardship progr...

Surface proteins of Gram-positive bacteria play important roles during the pathogenesis of human infections and require sortase for anchoring to the cell-wall envelope. Sortase cleaves surface proteins at the LPXTG motif and catalyzes the formation of an amide bond between the carboxyl group of threonine (T) and the amino group of cell-wall crossbridges. The NMR structure of sortase reveals a u...

In the 19th century, it was discovered that immune sera were useful in treating infectious diseases. Serum therapy was largely abandoned in the 1940s because of the toxicity associated with the administration of heterologous sera and the introduction of effective antimicrobial chemotherapy. Recent advances in the technology of monoclonal antibody production provide the means to generate human a...

The unfavorable effects of neonatal immunodeficiency are limited by some naturally occurring compensatory mechanisms, such as the introduction of protective and immunological components of human milk in the infant. Breast-feeding maintains the maternal-fetal immunological link after birth, may favor the transmission of immunocompetence from the mother to her infant, and is considered an importa...

The testing of potential antimicrobial agents in animal models of infectious disease is a long-established practice and is acknowledged as an essential prerequisite of antiinfective therapy, but the ultimate utility of such experiments in the development of antimicrobial agents is still debated. Although there are guidelines specifying appropriate models and relevant parameters for evaluating t...