Icaac 2012 Asm/ Icaac (American Society for Microbiology/ Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy)

The 39th ASM ICAAC Meeting, attended by over 16,000 delegates, highlighted numerous late-stage development antibacterials. The presentation of over 600 reports (posters, symposia and oral presentations) regarding resistance emergence underscores the evolving landscape of antibiotic susceptibility worldwide. Although bacterial genomic efforts are slowly expanding the potential sources of novel targets, the established antibacterial classes, including quinolones, beta-lactams, protein synthesis inhibitors and carbapenems, were most prevalent among the presentations. Quinolones dominated this conference, with many presentations of moxifloxacin (> 72 presentations), gatifloxacin (> 66 presentations) and gemifloxacin (> 59 presentations). The new class of antibacterials, the oxazolidinones, represented by Linezolid, was also highlighted.