I feel that single-target drugs are getting harder to make.
I remember years back, when there were three AIDS drugs going through clinical trials. We were all shocked when all of them failed. But some smart soul realized that when combined, the three were a miracle cocktail. Indeed, fast forward to the present and this cocktail has basically turned AIDS from a death-sentence to a background disease (of course, I simplify – the point is the success of the cocktail, combination therapy).
Combination therapy in this sense, should not be confused with drugs that are not complementary. For example, MMR and DPT vaccines are mixes of individual independent vaccines.
I claim that we need to explore how combinations of drugs, say antibiotics or antivirals, can work better than the constituent drugs alone.
Alas, as far as I can tell, this will complicate clinical trials, trying to deconvolute the contribution of each individual component. But I am hopeful that tools that can munge and analyze large data sets might able to do this deconvolution.
What do you think?
Link 2: Access : New TB drug cocktail : Nature Reviews Microbiology
The development of novel combination therapies is one of several strategies that are currently being pursued to combat tuberculosis TB. Recently, researchers at the XIX International AIDS Conference presented the results of a groundbreaking clinical trial which showed that a combination of three drugs can kill more than 99% of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in infected patients.
Image from Wm Jas
