Combined use of antibiotics

The widespread emergence of antimicrobial resistance and the depleted antibiotic discovery pipeline have become one of the principal public health problems of the 21st century. It undermines the efficiency of antimicrobial agents in both human and veterinary medicine. Despite enormous efforts to research new drugs, there have been no new broad-spectrum antimicrobial agents applied in the clinic for decades, in large part because of the rigorous pharmacological, chemical, and biological requisites for effective antimicrobial agents. In this review, we outline a series of combinations of antibiotics and of antibiotics with nonantibiotic adjuvants. This strategy may help to prolong the life span of these antibiotics and inhibit the dissemination of resistance. All of these pipelines are promising methods for the treatment of resistant-bacterial infections, and they also should be further investigated to investigate their full potential in facing the threat of a post antibiotic era.