A cocktail of antibiotics and other drugsIMAGE: FLICKR USER EMILYBEAN
The rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, along with the slowed rate of new antibiotic development, has prompted researchers to look for alternative therapies to fight disease-causing pathogens. New research, published yesterday (April 25) ahead-of-print in Nature Chemical Biology, provides evidence that combining antibiotics with marketed drug compounds could be one answer, uncovering previously unknown antibacterial functions of drugs that boost the effectiveness of antibiotics.
"This is a really ingenious approach that, frankly, we need a lot more of," said Christopher Graber, an infectious disease physician in the Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System who was not involved in the research.
"It opens up a whole new field of combining antibiotics with non-antibiotics," agreed Mark Riddle, a research medical officer at the Naval Medical Research Center's Enteric Diseases ...
