Take Two of These

Drugmakers are teaming up to test the disease-fighting power of combination therapies earlier in the development cycle than ever before.

Written byBob Grant

| 6 min read

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A tuberculosis patient in Cape Town, South Africa, receives a dose of the standard four-drug treatment regimen. ERIC MILLER (PANOS)

Living with a severe illness like cancer, HIV, or tuberculosis (TB) means taking many medications on a daily basis. With HIV, it’s a cocktail of antiretrovirals that target pathways for viral replication or entry into host cells. For TB, a slew of antibiotics strikes multiple blows to the infecting bacterial population in an attempt to eliminate even the most resistant individuals. And in cancer, chemotherapeutics are administered in layers, with different compounds attacking various facets of tumor growth.

Historically, clinical combination therapies have been cobbled together out of medicines that were approved for use individually. TB patients, for example, have been treated with a suite of antibiotics for more than 50 years, with substitutions and additions of approved medications being made to the regimen as ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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