According to the World Health Organization (WHO), antibiotic-resistant pathogens could soon become one of the most dramatic threats to public health. While the arsenal of effective antibacterial drugs shrinks further, the development of new drugs is occurring at a far too slow pace. In addition, the rapid evolution of antibiotic resistance will most likely make the new drugs ineffective within short time periods. Faced with this threatening situation, scientists hope to be able to maintain and improve the effectiveness of existing antibiotics, through the targeted combination of certain active agent properties. An international research team led by the Evolutionary Ecology and Genetics research group at Kiel University has now, for the first time, presented a systematic experimental analysis of the effectiveness of various antibiotic combinations against the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The researchers discovered that certain properties of an antibiotic combination are crucial for the efficacy of treatment. The researchers published their innovative model for “Antibiotic Combination Efficacy” (ACE) in the current issue of the journal PLOS Biology.
This article highlights the scope for developing therapeutics with new innovative, alternative approaches. The current trillion dollars pharmaceutical industry is in peril where the current drug development pipeline is slow, inefficient and incapable of being extended to multi-combination drug therapies as well as minimally focused on prevention. The complex modeling of diseases and biological functions has been limited because of the inability to integrate large scale molecular pathways.
Watch this Video to understand how recent advances provide breakthrough technology for doing scalable modeling of complex molecular systems to dramatically accelerate drug discovery and development.