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Antibiotic Selection

Antibiotic Selection

Combined Effects of Drugs: Synergism

Combined Effects of Drugs: Synergism

Synergism is a useful mechanism where combining two or more drugs is more effective than each constituent used alone. Such combinations are also called supra-additive interactions. The drugs collectively enhance the final therapeutic effect by acting on different targets. Another advantage is that the low dose of each constituent drug is sufficient to achieve the desired effect. This helps reduce the duration of therapy and lower the adverse effects of these drugs.
Such synergistic combinations...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 4, 2025

Diagonal Method to Measure Synergy Among Any Number of Drugs

Diagonal Method to Measure Synergy Among Any Number of Drugs

Published on: June 21, 2018

Sample-efficient identification of high-dimensional antibiotic synergy with a normalized diagonal sampling design.

Jennifer Brennan¹, Lalit Jain², Sofia Garman³

¹Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America.

Plos Computational Biology

|July 18, 2022

Summary

Developing new antibiotic combinations to combat resistance is challenging due to the vast number of tests required. This study introduces a novel metric and experimental design to efficiently screen for synergistic antibiotic combinations, significantly reducing testing complexity.

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Last Updated: Sep 4, 2025

Diagonal Method to Measure Synergy Among Any Number of Drugs

Diagonal Method to Measure Synergy Among Any Number of Drugs

Published on: June 21, 2018

High-throughput Identification of Synergistic Drug Combinations by the Overlap2 Method

High-throughput Identification of Synergistic Drug Combinations by the Overlap2 Method

Published on: May 21, 2018

Antimicrobial Synergy Testing by the Inkjet Printer-assisted Automated Checkerboard Array and the Manual Time-kill Method

Antimicrobial Synergy Testing by the Inkjet Printer-assisted Automated Checkerboard Array and the Manual Time-kill Method

Published on: April 18, 2019

Area of Science:

Pharmacology and Microbiology
Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Background:

Antibiotic resistance poses a significant global public health threat.
Discovering effective synergistic antibiotic combinations is crucial but experimentally intensive.
Current methods for testing drug synergy face scalability issues due to combinatorial explosion.

Purpose of the Study:

To develop a novel metric for quantifying antibiotic synergy.
To propose an efficient experimental design for screening synergistic antibiotic combinations.
To reduce the number of required experiments for identifying effective multi-drug therapies.

Main Methods:

Introduction of a new synergy metric inspired by Fractional Inhibitory Concentration Index and Highest Single Agent models.
Development of a novel experimental design sampling along normalized diagonals in concentration space.
Application of the method to screen 2- to 8-way combinations of 8 antibiotics.

Main Results:

The proposed method significantly reduces the number of combinations needed for synergy screening.
The new design efficiently identifies synergistic antibiotic combinations.
Screening 2- to 8-way combinations of 8 antibiotics required sampling only 2,560 unique concentrations.

Conclusions:

The novel metric and experimental design offer a computationally and experimentally tractable approach to discovering synergistic antibiotic combinations.
This method accelerates the identification of potential new treatments to combat antibiotic resistance.
The approach is scalable for screening complex multi-drug interactions.