Posted: 16th August 2015

Antibiotic resistance is responsible for a worldwide death toll totalling hundreds of thousands, and each year the problem gets worse. Adaptive therapy, which has emerged from computational modelling of the treatment of bacterial infections, viruses and cancer offers a new approach which may help doctors battle antibiotic resistance using new combinations of existing drugs. 
 
Daniel Nichol (Department of Computer Science, Oxford) and Jacob Scott (Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology) have built a tool capable of predicting sequential adaptive therapies for E coli which reduce, and in many cases entirely prevent, the risk of highly resistant disease emerging.
 
Read more about this important research in the Inspired Research Magazine Winter 2015 edition.