Three-drug combinations could help counter antibiotic resistance, UCLA biologists report

Each year, approximately 700,000 people die from drug-resistant bacterial infections. A study by UCLA life scientists could be a major step toward combating drug-resistant infections. The research, reported in the journal Royal Society Interface, found that combinations of three different antibiotics can often overcome bacteria’s resistance to antibiotics, even when none of the three antibiotics on their own — or even two of the three together — is effective. The researchers grew E. coli bacteria in a laboratory and treated the samples with combinations of one, two and three antibiotics from a group of 14 drugs. The biologists studied how effectively every single possible combination of drugs worked to kill the bacteria. Some combinations killed 100 percent of the bacteria, including 94 of the 364 three-drug groupings the researchers tested. According to said Pamela Yeh, the paper’s senior author and a UCLA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, the success rate might have been even greater if the researchers tested higher doses of the drugs. Elif Tekin, the paper’s lead author and a UCLA graduate student, helped create a sophisticated framework that enabled the scientists to determine when adding a third antibiotic was producing new effects that combinations of just two drugs couldn’t achieve. “Three antibiotics can change the dynamic,” she said. “Not many scientists realize that three-drug combinations can have really beneficial effect...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news