Piperacillin: uses, dosing, side effects & brands
Piperacillin is a medicine sold in the U.S. under one brand. Below: what the FDA label says, every product that contains it, what the pills look like, and its recall record.
Key facts
- Available as
- Injectable
- Sold as
- Pipracil
- Prescription?
- Prescription only
- Generic available?
- Not in our catalog
Every piperacillin product we track (1)
Same active ingredient — different manufacturer, form, price and FDA recall record. That last one is what our independent score measures.
Only one: Pipracil.
Combination products containing piperacillin
A combination is a different drug — different dosing, different warnings. It is listed here so you can find it, not so you can substitute it.
Piperacillin and breastfeeding
From LactMed, the US National Library of Medicine’s Drugs and Lactation Database — quoted, not rewritten.
Full LactMed record for piperacillin: levels in milk, effects in breastfed infants, and the drugs it would consider insteadLimited information indicates that piperacillin produces low levels in milk that are not expected to cause adverse effects in breastfed infants. Occasionally disruption of the infant's gastrointestinal flora, resulting in diarrhea or thrush have been reported with penicillins, but these effects have not been adequately evaluated. Piperacillin is acceptable in nursing mothers.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, record revised July 15, 2024. LactMed states its information is not a substitute for professional judgement.
What people report to the FDA about piperacillin
The FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) collects reports from patients and clinicians. It holds 15,381 reports naming piperacillin, and the FDA flagged 98% of those reports as serious. The effects reported most often — leaving out reports about overdose, misuse or the condition being treated, which dominate the raw list for common medicines:
- acute kidney injury1,064 reports
- pyrexia1,013 reports
- diarrhoea746 reports
- neutropenia636 reports
- pneumonia634 reports
- thrombocytopenia621 reports
- febrile neutropenia596 reports
- nausea545 reports
Read these as a signal, not a rate. A report does not mean piperacillin caused the effect — anyone can file one, and many describe people taking several medicines for several conditions. Crucially there is no denominator: FAERS does not record how many people took the drug, so these counts cannot be turned into “X% of patients” — a bigger number often just means a more widely used or more talked-about drug. Duplicates exist, and publicity drives reporting. For what is actually established, read the FDA label section above.
Source: openFDA drug/event (FAERS), retrieved July 27, 2026.
Related calculators
Frequently asked questions
Can you take piperacillin with other medicines?
It depends on the medicine. We check it against the FDA labels rather than guessing: our interaction checker searches each drug's own label for the other and quotes what it says, naming the section it came from. Run piperacillin against whatever else you take — and remember that a label not naming a drug is not the same as that combination being safe.
What forms does piperacillin come in?
Across the brands we track, piperacillin is currently marketed as injectable, per the FDA's National Drug Code Directory. Each form is dosed differently — follow the label for the exact product you were prescribed.
Is there a generic piperacillin?
We do not currently list a generic-labelled piperacillin product. That does not always mean none exists — it means none appears under a generic name in the FDA data we track. Ask your pharmacist.
Cite this page
- APA
- pharmaranks. (2026, July 24). Piperacillin: uses, dosing, side effects & brands. https://pharmaranks.com/drugs/piperacillin
- MLA
- “Piperacillin: uses, dosing, side effects & brands.” pharmaranks, 24 July 2026, https://pharmaranks.com/drugs/piperacillin.
We summarise public FDA and NIH sources — for a clinical claim, cite the primary source we link to as well.
Sources: FDA openFDA drug label, National Drug Code Directory, and Enforcement (recall) database. This page reproduces public FDA data and is not medical advice. Dosing is set by your prescriber.
Read the full FDA label for piperacillin on DailyMed (NIH) ↗.