Conventional approaches to treating bacterial infections frequently involve using large doses of a common antibiotic drug, but a new study suggests that using a sequence of drugs may be more effective.
The study — published online on PLOS Biology — examined whether multidrug deployment strategies are as effective as, or even better than, synergistic antibiotic combinations at reducing bacterial densities.
Researchers tested the efficacy of using four 12-hour rounds of two antibiotics — erythromycin and doxycycline — against Escherichia coli in the lab, and compared it to a 50-50 cocktail of the two drugs together.
They found that the cocktail worked better in the short-term but failed to stop the proliferation of the E. coli after a while. The sequential treatment worked better and cut E. coli bacterial loads to a quarter of what the cocktail was able to accomplish, despite the drugs being used in fairly low dosages.
By reducing bacterial loads, there are fewer bacteria left to form resistance to the antibiotics used during treatment.
"It is not our intention to advocate for the indiscriminate clinical use of low-dose regimens," concluded the study authors. "Rather, we are claiming that sequential dosing strategies exist for administering antibiotics that are sufficiently potent, and which prevent adaptation enough, to clear a bacterium when the equivalent dose combination treatment fails to do so."
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