Antibiotic Cycling: A Cautionary Tale
- Series
- Research Horizons Seminar
- Time
- Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - 12:10 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 006
- Speaker
- Howie Weiss – GA Tech
Antibiotics have greatly reduced morbidity and mortality from
infectious diseases. Although antibiotic resistance is not a new
problem, it breadth now constitutes asignificant threat to human health.
One strategy to help combat resistance is to find novel
ways of using obsolete antibiotics. For strains of E. coli and P.
aeruginosa, pairs of antibiotics have been found where evolution of
resistance to one increases, sometimes significantly, sensitivity to the
other. These researchers
have proposed cycling such
pairs to treat infections. Similar strategies are being investigated to
treat cancer. Using systems of ODEs, we model several possible treatment
protocols using pairs and triples of such antibiotics, and investigate
the speed of ascent of multiply resistant
mutants. Rapid ascent would doom this strategy. This is joint work with
Klas Udekwu (Stockholm University).