Here is some of my research experiences. Not that these are not the only items of interest over my career of 25 years. But these are a few of the things that were particularly interesting and the ones I found great satisfaction in. Bacteroides fragilis is an anaerobe. It's one of the major anaerobic infecting organisms in human disease. Except for this organism, all the other anaerobes that are pathogenic respond very favorably to ampicillin or other penicillins. But this guy produces a lot of beta lactamase and is frequently high resistant to penicillin. I often thought, because I was really interested in anaerobic organisms, if we could get something that would hit that guy, wow, we would have a real good drug for those people that have these infections of the peritoneal cavity (peritonitis).

Well, here is an example. Ampicillin, this is the MIC, in micrograms/ml, the lowest amount of ampicillin that can inhibit. Well, it didn't inhibit any of the resistant organisms because the enzyme (beta-lactamase) was destroying it. Here is the active agent that blocks the penicillinase (beta lactamase). It's almost like an acid - base type of reaction. Not really, but something like that. The drug itself is not a very good antibiotic. But when you combine, in this case, a 100 µg of sulbactam with ampicillin, you get a dramatic effect. Let me get back there. Here is ampicillin. Six micrograms of ampicillin, three micrograms of sulbactam, you're effective. What's important about this is that's achievable in human circulating blood. These levels of ampicillin alone are not achievable. That's failure. In several cases, we got that.

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