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Combining more than two drugs to fight harmful bacteria are more effective. A team of UCLA biologists has discovered thousands of four-and five-drug combinations of antibiotics that are more effective at killing harmful bacteria than the prevailing views suggested. This could be a major step toward protecting public health at a time when pathogens and common infections are increasingly becoming resistant to antibiotics.
Working with eight antibiotics, the researchers analyzed how every possible four- and five-drug combination, including many with varying dosages- a total of 18,278 combinations in all worked against E. coli. They expected that some of the combinations would be very effective at killing the bacteria, but they were startled by how many potent combinations they discovered.
For every combination they tested, the researchers first predicted how effective they thought it would be in stopping the growth of E. coli. Among the four-drug combinations, there were 1,676 groupings that performed better than they expected. Among the five-drug combinations, 6,443 groupings were more effective than expected.
Some of the four- and five-drug combinations were effective at least partly because individual medications have different mechanisms for targeting E. coli. Some drugs attack the cell walls, others attack the DNA inside. Combining different methods of attacking may be more effective than just a single approach.”
The drug combinations have been tested in only a laboratory setting and likely are at least years away from being evaluated as possible treatments for people. With the specter of antibiotic resistance threatening to turn back health care to the pre-antibiotic period, the ability to more judiciously use combinations of existing antibiotics that singly are losing potency is okay. This work will accelerate the testing in humans of promising antibiotic combinations for bacterial infections that we are ill-equipped to deal with today.