Antibiotics kill bacteria or stop them multiplying, and they are grouped by how they do it — penicillins and cephalosporins break down the bacterial cell wall, macrolides block protein synthesis, glycopeptides such as vancomycin are held in reserve for resistant organisms like MRSA. Choosing the right one depends on the likely bacterium, the site of infection and local resistance patterns, which is why they are not interchangeable.
The facts on this page are pulled directly from official U.S. FDA datasets — they are not written from memory. Each field below names the dataset it came from, so you can check it yourself.
Plain-English summaries and drug-class explainers are written and reviewed by the Priya Life Science editorial team, led by Sreepriya Prasannan (MSc Digital Transformation of Life Sciences (Innopharma Education / Griffith College); MSc & BSc Botany). Data is retrieved automatically from the sources above and cross-checked with AI-assisted verification (Anthropic's Claude) — brand and generic names are matched against the exact FDA product record so that a combination product or a different formulation cannot be mistaken for the drug on this page. An editor reviews the result before publication. We describe this in full in our editorial standards and corrections policy. The FDA data on this page was last retrieved on 11 Aug 2026.