Chemotherapeutic Agents for the Systemic Mycoses

DURING the past seven years there has been a sustained increase of interest in the treatment of the systemic mycoses, an interest nurtured both by successful advances in therapy and by the emergence of new diseases. Two new antifungous antibiotics, amphotericin B and X-5079C, each of which is effective against a variety of fungous infections in laboratory animals and in man, have appeared. With the former drug a disease, cryptococcal meningitis, universally fatal in the past, has been successfully treated in at least 60 per cent of patients. An older drug (2-hydroxystilbamidine) has been carefully studied in an impressive number . . .