Aminoglycoside antibiotics recent developments

Paromomycin sulfate is an aminoglycoside antibiotic that until recently was used in parasitology only for oral therapy of intestinal parasitic infections (see previous text). It has recently been developed for the treatment of visceral leishmaniasis. A phase 3 trial in India showed excellent efficacy for this disease, with a daily intramuscular dosage of 11 mg/kg for 21 days yielding a 95% cure rate, and noninferiority compared with amphotericin. The drug was registered for the treatment of visceral leishmaniasis in India in 2006. In initial studies, paromomycin was well tolerated, with common mild injection pain, uncommon ototoxicity and reversible liver enzyme elevations, and no nephrotoxicity. Paromomycin is much less expensive than liposomal amphotericin or miltefosine, the other promising new therapies for visceral leishmaniasis. 

Despite a paucity of information at the molecular level on the principles associated with specific recognition of RNA sequences hy aminoglycosides, targeting RNA sequences and recognition of specihc sites of RNA molecules hy aminoglycoside antibiotics are topics of salient interest. However, recent developments in in vivo selection methods resulted in identihcation of particular RNA sequences that specifically bind to certain aminoglycoside antibiotics with high affinity [174,176,177],... 

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