Clinical Trial Found Dalbavancin Treatment for Staphylococcus aureus Gives Similar Outcomes to Standard Treatment

A clinical trial supported by the NIH found that “that the outcome of treating complicated Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections with two intravenous (IV) doses of the antibiotic dalbavancin seven days apart is just as good as daily IV doses of conventional antibiotics over four to six weeks.”

This trial was undertaken because of the small number of antimicrobial drugs available to treat Staphylococcus aureus and its growing drug resistance. Standard therapy involves “inserting a long IV line known as a peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) into a vein, usually in the arm, to deliver antibiotics through the blood for many weeks. The PICC line remains in place for the full duration of treatment, and people with a PICC line have many limitations on their activity to avoid damaging the line. Its long-term presence and use can lead to complications such as blood clots and additional infections.” Dalbavancin treatment requires “temporarily inserting a short catheter into a vein in the hand or arm twice for only an hour at a time.”

The trial involved people receiving either standard therapy or dalbavancin therapy, and the study team compared the overall treatment outcomes between the two. Dalbavancin was overall not found to be superior to standard therapy when looking at the overall outcomes, but “the individual components of overall outcome, such as clinical success, were similar for the two groups, suggesting that dalbavancin therapy and standard therapy were equally good.”

A similar quality-of-life was reported between the two groups. However, ” the rate of side effects leading to treatment discontinuation and of complications such as catheter-associated blood clots were greater in the standard therapy group than the dalbavancin therapy group. Yet the overarching similarities in the components of overall outcome diluted these differences.”