FIGURE 2.

Antimicrobial treatment strategies: (A) disadvantages of using single drugs and (B) advantages of using combinatorial treatments. The advantage of using combinatorial treatments of synergistic drug pairs provides the opportunity to lower the dosage of the individual agents, thereby reducing toxicity while maintaining the wanted effect on bacteria. Moreover, a synergistic response can occur because of complementary drug action (multiple targets sites on the same protein or pathway are hit; Pemovska et al., 2018). By combining two drugs that achieve the same effect through different mechanisms of action, the development of resistance to a single drug in the combination may be less likely to occur, and when it does occur, it may have a lower impact on the therapeutic outcome (Pirrone et al., 2011). Finally, the use of more than one agent broadens the antibacterial spectrum of the empirical therapy and thus ensures that at least one agent will cover the infecting organism (Gurjar et al., 2014).