THURSDAY, Aug. 14, 2025 (HealthDay News) — A new way to battle bloodborne staph infections could help save lives while combating the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to new clinical trial results.
Two intravenous doses of the antibiotic dalbavancin delivered seven days apart worked just as well as daily IV doses of conventional antibiotics in quelling Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections, researchers reported Aug. 13 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“Given the small number of antimicrobial drugs available to treat Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections and the bacteria’s growing drug resistance, establishing dalbavancin as a beneficial therapy for these severe infections gives us a vital new alternative to treat them,” Dr. John Beigel said in a news release. He’s acting director of microbiology and infectious diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
NIAID sponsored and funded the trial, which involved 200 hospitalized adults with complicated staph blood infections treated at 23 medical centers in the U.S. and Canada.
The patients were randomly assigned to receive either two doses of dalbavancin or daily IV antibiotics, with overall treatment lasting four to eight weeks. In all, 100 received dalbavancin and the same number had standard antibiotics.
Dalbavancin is a relatively recent antibiotic discovery, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in May 2014, according to Drugs.com.
The standard antibiotics used depended on the type of staph a person had. Cefazolin or penicillin were used for regular staph, while vancomycin or daptomycin were implemented against antibiotic-resistant staph, also known as MRSA.
Results showed that dalbavancin worked about as well as standard therapy, providing doctors a new option for treating a severe staph infection.
“Our findings give patients and health care providers the data to support an extra choice when deciding on treatment for complicated S. aureus bacteremia,” lead researcher Dr. Nicholas Turner, an assistant professor at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., said in a news release.
What’s more, the dalbavancin was easier to deliver. People receiving daily antibiotics needed an implanted catheter that remained in place for the full duration of their treatment – something that can lead to complications like blood clots and additional infections.
By comparison, people receiving dalbavancin only needed a short catheter inserted twice for about an hour each time, researchers said.
As a result, side effects like blood clots occurred more often in the standard treatment group compared to the dalbavancin group, researchers found.
Serious side effects were about as common with dalbavancin as with standard antibiotics – 40 cases versus 34 cases, results show.
However, severe events leading to treatment discontinuation occurred in 12% of the standard treatment patients compared to 3% of those treated with dalbavancin.
Researchers next plan to compare the cost-effectiveness of the two approaches.
More information
The Cleveland Clinic has more about staph infections.
SOURCE: National Institutes of Health, news release, Aug. 13, 2025
