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 ...
