Representational Image of cUTIs. Source: ChatGPT
Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences’ Professor Tom Lodise, PharmD, PhD, will conduct a large, real-world study focused on the national burden, resistance landscape, and unmet medical needs associated with complicated urinary tract infections (cUTIs) caused by Enterobacterales.
To support this work, biopharmaceutical company, Basilea, awarded him $185,500. The 25-year-old Swiss-based organization develops and commercializes innovative pharmaceutical products to meet the medical needs of patients with severe and life-threatening bacterial and fungal infections.
Rising antimicrobial resistance among uropathogenic Enterobacterales has further complicated management, reducing the effectiveness of many commonly used oral antibiotics and increasing reliance on intravenous therapy, prolonged hospital stays, and outpatient parenteral antibiotic therapy (OPAT).
“cUTIs represent one of the most common and costly infection-related reasons for hospitalization in the United States, accounting for nearly 600,000 hospital admissions annually and billions of dollars in health-care expenditures,” said Lodise, who also serves as the College’s Rudolph J. and Dorothy A. Blythe Endowed Research Chair for Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
The study will leverage the Premier Healthcare Database, a large U.S. hospital source which contains microbiology-linked data from across U.S. hospitals, to better understand how common and serious urinary tract infections (UTIs) caused by Enterobacterales are. Dr. Lodise and his research team will analyze data from more than 6.6 million adult patients to evaluate antibiotic treatment patterns, resistance rates, and clinical outcomes, and to identify where current treatment approaches may be falling short.
The goal of the project is to find ways to help patients recover safely with fewer hospital days and to make it easier to switch from IV antibiotics to pills when possible. This could help reduce complications, lower costs, and allow more patients to be treated at home instead of staying in the hospital.
Key outcomes include defining patient populations most affected by resistant Enterobacterales cUTIs and help identifying:
- hospital stays that might be avoidable
- delays in being discharged from the hospital
- needing IV antibiotics after leaving the hospital (OPAT)
- missed opportunities to switch from IV antibiotics to oral medications
Study results will directly inform Basilea’s clinical development and value positioning for ceftibuten-ledaborbactam, an investigational oral β-lactam/β-lactamase inhibitor being developed to address these critical unmet needs.
“Dr. Lodise’s continued leadership and impact within our research community exemplifies the level of scholarship and collaboration we strive to cultivate across the institution,” said ACPHS Director of Research, Joseph Carreno, PharmD. “Our congratulations to him for this important award to advance high-impact research aimed at improving outcomes for patients with serious, drug-resistant infections.”
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