2012
- ▪K. Wood, S. Nishida, E.D. Sontag, P. Cluzel, "Mechanism-independent method for predicting response to multiple drug exposure in bacteria", Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, vol. 109, pp. 12254-12259, 2012. pdf
Abstract
Drugs are commonly used in combinations larger than two for treating bacterial infections. It is generally impossible to infer directly from the effects of individual drugs the net effect of a multi-drug combination. This paper describes an empirically derived mechanism-independent method for predicting the microbial growth response to combinations of more than two drugs, experimentally tested on both gram-negative (Escherichia coli) and grampositive (Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria. The method shows that for a wide range of drugs, the bacterial responses to drug pairs are sufficient to infer the effects of larger drug combinations, and provides a simple formula for the prediction.