The Structural Aspects of Carbapenem Antibiotics

The discovery of thienamycin in 1976 caused much synthetic research effort to be concentrated on carbapenem antibiotics, by many groups.To date, two carbapenems, which need to be coadministered with other drugs, and then a new generation carbapenem, which could be utilized as a single agent, were developed for clinical use based on the progress of synthetic chemistry.Today, attention has been focused on the development of next generation carbapenem antibiotics.These trends of the carbapenem antibiotics developed in last quarter century are reviewed from a viewpoint of their chemical structures.