FLICKR, ROBSON#Switching up the antibiotics used to treat bacterial infections is by no means a revolutionary concept. “Cycling—or rotating antibiotics—has been a hope for a number of years,” Rush University’s Robert Weinstein told The Scientist. The hope is to effectively “confuse the bacteria by changing the class of antibiotics you use,” he added.
A pair of researchers from Technical University of Denmark this week proposed a new approach, called collateral sensitivity cycling, which they said could be used to both better treat illness and to spurn the emergence of drug resistance. Lejla Imamovic and Morten Sommer analyzed wild-type Escherichia coli and strains evolved in the laboratory to be resistant to 23 commonly used antibiotics, then treated the bacteria with pairs of drugs in a cyclical fashion. The research revealed sets of antibiotics that successfully killed the E. coli colonies without allowing the bacteria to evolve resistance.
The study “is an in-depth analysis of resistance linkages and susceptibilities,” said Weinstein, who was not involved in the work. “It’s an important topic because . . . development of antimicrobial drugs ...
