Dirithromycin

A sensitive, rapid liquid chromatographic-electrospray ionization mass spectrometric method for determination of erythromycylamine in human plasma was developed and validated. Erythromycylamine in plasma (0.2 mL) was extracted with ethyl acetate, the organic phase was transferred to another clear 1.5 mL Eppendorf tube and evaporated to dryness under gentle nitrogen stream at 45 degrees C, and the residue was dissolved in 100 microL of mobile phase. The samples were separated using a Thermo Hypersil HyPURITY C18 reversed-phase column (150 mm x 2.1 mm I.D., 5 microm). A mobile phase containing 10 mM of ammonium acetate (pH = 6.4)-acetonitrile-methanol (50:10:40, v/v/v) was used isocratically eluting at a flow rate of 0.2 mL/min. Erythromycylamine and its internal standard (IS), midecamycin, were measured by electrospray ion source in positive selective ion monitoring mode. The method demonstrated that good linearity ranged from 4.5 to 720 ng/mL with r = 0.

Erythromycins have been part of our armamentarium against selected bacterial infections since they were discovered in 1952 and approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1964. In 1991, two newer, long-acting erythromycin analogues, azythromycin (brand name: Zithromax) and clarithromycin (brand name: Biaxin) were approved by the FDA. They were joined a few years later by a third long-acting form, dirithromycin (brand name: Dynabac).

The oriented attachment (OA) mechanism is promising for designing novel nanomaterials, yet an intensive understanding of the relationship between the crystal structure and attachment orientation is still lacking. In this work, we report layered hexagonal crystals of the pharmaceutical dirithromycin (DIR) containing multiple layers fabricated via a solvothermal method for a certain period of time at 40 °C. These elongated hexagonal crystals experience an OA that is preferentially on the face (001) of the initial crystals to assemble the final crystals into layered stacks. Through agreement with molecular modeling calculations, we predicted the final crystal growth morphology and confirmed the favored attachment surface based on the energy change ΔE following an OA event. These simulation results at the molecular level yielded good agreement with the crystal growth experiments. This study demonstrates the critical importance of combining experiments with a computational approach to understand the intrinsic molecular details of the OA growth mechanism of other compounds and to design nanomaterials with a desirable morphology and physical and chemical properties.

Comprehensive therapeutic use of macrolides in humans and animals is important in the selection of macrolide-resistant Campylobacter isolates. This study shows high co-resistance to erythromycin, azithromycin, clarithromycin, dirithromycin and tylosin, with contributions from the 23S rRNA gene and drug efflux systems. The CmeABC efflux pump plays an important role in reduced macrolide susceptibility, accompanied by contributions from the CmeDEF efflux pump and potentially a third efflux pump. To improve clinical performance of licensed antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents, it is important to understand the factors in Campylobacter that affect susceptibility to macrolide antibiotics. Using mutants that lack the functional genes coding for the CmeB and CmeF efflux pump proteins and the CmeR transcriptional repressor, we show that these efflux pumps are potential targets for the development of therapeutic strategies that use a combination of a macrolide with an efflux pump inhibitor (EPI) to restore macrolide efficacy.