What to Consider When Designing Drug-dosing Regimens

Elizabeth Dodds-Ashley, PharmD, MHS, at the Department of Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine, explains how changes in antimicrobial resistance should be reflected in drug dosage.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“Certainly, [the] pharmacodynamics [of a drug] are considered when drug-dosing regimens are initially designed. I think that, maybe, where we’re not spending as much time is on things that have evolved over time, [such as] some older antibiotics that are now being used to treat very resistant infections that were never around when the drugs were first studied; [consequently], maybe those doses are not the right doses anymore, although they were right initially, when the drugs were first released.

I think that it’s something that is hard and challenging to put into front-line providers’ day-to-day drug prescribing, but something that certainly should be considered on a more global perspective. [That way], when we have particular resistance data for a patient and there’s a particularly resistant pathogen, we take that into account to get the dose correct.”