Use of modeling techniques to aid in antibiotic selection

Over the past decade, the use of modeling techniques in the development of novel antibiotics has been primarily associated with in vitro dynamic models. These models allow comparisons among different antibiotics by simulating human pharmacokinetics. Although dynamic models have been used extensively, their full potential has not been achieved because of inadequate experimental design and/or suboptimal quantitation of bacterial killing/regrowth curves inherent in many studies. These issues are discussed in this review, which is based on recent pharmacodynamic findings with novel fluoroquinolones.