Pamela Yeh (University of California)
Abstract. The evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria is a global public health threat. Evolutionary medicine is an emerging field of study that uses principles of evolution to help inform and shape our understanding and treatment of diseases. While evolution of drug resistance is one of the more well-known topics for which evolution can offer insight, there is still much that we do not know. I will discuss drug combinations and how they interact, and how certain interaction types – antagonistic drug combinations, which are currently not used clinically – may be better at slowing the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistant pathogens. I will further discuss how we can use novel drug combinations to "rescue" drugs previously thought unusable for certain bacteria strains. Finally, I will discuss how we can generalize drug-drug interactions to higher-order combinations of drugs, and how our understanding of drug-drug interactions may offer insight to other systems and their interactions, such as protein interactions and predator-prey interactions.