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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Story:

Scientists have traditionally believed that combining more than two drugs to fight harmful bacteria would yield diminishing returns. The prevailing theory is that that the incremental benefits of combining three or more drugs would be too small to matter, or that the interactions among the drugs would cause their benefits to cancel one another out.

Now, 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. Their findings, reported today in the journal npj Systems Biology and Applications, 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.

[...] Yeh added that although the results are very promising, 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 era, the ability to more judiciously use combinations of existing antibiotics that singly are losing potency is welcome," said Michael Kurilla, director of the Division of Clinical Innovation at the National Institutes of Health/National Center for Advancing Translational Science. "This work will accelerate the testing in humans of promising antibiotic combinations for bacterial infections that we are ill-equipped to deal with today."

Original Submission

The researchers are creating open-access software based on their work that they plan to make available to other scientists next year. The software will enable other researchers to analyze the different combinations of antibiotics studied by the UCLA biologists, and to input data from their own tests of drug combinations.

One component of the software is a mathematical formula for analyzing how multiple factors interact, which the UCLA scientists developed as part of their research. They call the framework "mathematical analysis for general interactions of components," or MAGIC.

"We think MAGIC is a generalizable tool that can be applied to other diseases including cancers and in many other areas with three or more interacting components, to better understand how a complex system works," Tekin said.

Savage said he plans to use concepts from that framework in his ongoing research on how temperature, rain, light and other factors affect the Amazon rainforests.