f Current regimens used to treat pulmonary Mycobacterium abscessus disease have limited efficacy. There is an urgent need for new drugs and optimized combinations and doses. We performed hollow-fiber-system studies in which M. abscessus was exposed to moxifloxacin lung concentration-time profiles similar to human doses of between 0 and 800 mg/day. The minimum bactericidal concentration and MIC were 8 and 2 mg/liter, respectively, in our M. abscessus strain, suggesting bactericidal activity. Measurement of the moxifloxacin concentrations in each hollow-fiber system revealed an elimination rate constant (k el ) of 0.11 ؎ 0.05 h ؊1 (mean ؎ standard deviation) (half-life of 9.8 h). Inhibitory sigmoid maximal effect (E max ) modeling revealed that the highest E max was 3.15 ؎ 1.84 log 10 CFU/ml on day 3, and the exposure mediating 50% of E max (EC 50 ) was a 0-to 24-h area under the concentration time curve (AUC 0 -24 )-to-MIC ratio of 41.99 ؎ 31.78 (r 2 ؍ 0.99). The EC 80 was an AUC 0 -24 /MIC ratio of 102.11. However, no moxifloxacin concentration killed the bacteria to burdens below the starting inoculum. There was regrowth beyond day 3 in all doses, with replacement by a resistant subpopulation that had an MIC of >32 mg/liter by the end of the experiment. A quadratic function best described the relationship between the AUC 0 -24 /MIC ratio and the moxifloxacin-resistant subpopulation. Monte Carlo simulations of 10,000 patients revealed that the 400-to 800-mg/day doses would achieve or exceed the EC 80 in <12.5% of patients. The moxifloxacin susceptibility breakpoint was 0.25 mg/liter, which means that almost all M. abscessus clinical strains are moxifloxacin resistant by these criteria. While moxifloxacin's efficacy against M. abscessus was poor, formal combination therapy studies with moxifloxacin are still recommended.
Mycobacterium abscessus is a rapidly growing mycobacterium that is notorious because of resistance to most antibiotics (1). Pulmonary disease due to M. abscessus infection is chronic and relentless. Current regimens used to treat M. abscessus consist of a combination of amikacin, a macrolide, and either cefoxitin or imipenem; however, the regimens fail in most patients (2). Based on static in vitro models, amikacin is considered the key antibiotic in the treatment regimens (3-6). We recently demonstrated that the efficacy of amikacin based on concentration-time profiles achievable in human lungs as recapitulated in the hollow-fibersystem model of M. abscessus (HFS-M. abscessus) was poor, with failure to kill the bacteria below stasis (7). This, as well as clinical experience of high failure rates of amikacin-based regimens, means that there is an urgent need to find new antibiotics and optimize their doses. Here, we approached this by conducting a recommended formal pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/ PD) evaluation of alternative antibiotics with potential bactericidal activity (8).The 8-methoxy fluoroquinolone, moxifloxacin, has been shown to have excellent efficacy against Mycobacterium tub...