Efficacy and safety of intravenous infusion of doripenem versus imipenem in ventilator-associated pneumonia: A multicenter, randomized study*

OBJECTIVE: Doripenem is an investigational carbapenem with broad-spectrum activity against gram-negative and gram-positive pathogens, including multidrug-resistant strains, commonly responsible for ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). This large, phase III study compared doripenem with imipenem for the treatment of ventilator-associated pneumonia. DESIGN: Prospective, multicenter, parallel randomized, active-controlled, open-label study. SETTING: Intensive care units. PATIENTS: Adults (N = 531) who met clinical and radiologic criteria for ventilator-associated pneumonia. INTERVENTIONS: Patients were stratified by duration of mechanical ventilation ( or = 5 days), severity of illness (Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II score 15), and geographic region and then randomly assigned to doripenem 500 mg every 8 hrs via a 4-hr intravenous infusion or imipenem 500 mg every 6 hrs or 1000 mg every 8 hrs via 30- or 60-min intravenous infusions, respectively, for 7-14 days. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: The primary efficacy end points were the clinical cure rates in the clinical modified intent-to-treat (cMITT) and clinically evaluable populations. Doripenem was noninferior to imipenem (lower boundary of 95% confidence interval around the difference between treatments > or = -20%). Clinical cure rates were 68.3% (doripenem) and 64.2% (imipenem) in the clinically evaluable and 59.0% (doripenem) and 57.8% (imipenem) in the cMITT populations. In patients with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, clinical cure was 80.0% (doripenem) and 42.9% (imipenem) (p not significant); microbiological cure was 65.0% (doripenem) and 37.5% (imipenem). Only 18% (5 of 28) of P. aeruginosa isolates had minimum inhibitory concentration > or = 8 microg/mL at baseline or following therapy in the doripenem arm compared with 64% (16 of 25) in the imipenem treatment group (p = .001). Clinical cure rate was higher with doripenem than imipenem at higher Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II scores and older ages. Doripenem was generally well tolerated. CONCLUSIONS: In this large, phase III study of patients with ventilator-associated pneumonia, a 4-hr intravenous infusion of doripenem was clinically efficacious and therapeutically noninferior to imipenem.