Dosage Based Antibiotic Cycling: Exploring a New Solution to Antimicrobial Resistance

Antimicrobial resistance is a well-documented public health crisis that continues to escalate and threatens our ability to successfully treat infections. Multiple solutions have been suggested, researched, and implemented to fight the development of antimicrobial resistance, but no current solution has proved adequate. Promising treatment methods against antimicrobial resistance are multidrug approaches promoting antibiotic heterogeneity. Dosage based antibiotic cycling is a novel treatment approach proposed in this study that combines the individual strengths of two existing multidrug approaches: traditional antibiotic cycling and combination therapy. This experiment utilizes a Kirby Bauer Disk Susceptibility test and a Colony Biofilm Assay to explore the effectiveness of dosage based antibiotic cycling as a solution against antimicrobial resistance by evaluating its ability to minimize the development of drug resistance in strains of S. aureus and E. coli. Antibiotic resistance results from dosage based antibiotic cycling will be compared to the results from corresponding monotherapy and combination therapy trials to determine if one strategy is more or less effective in preventing antimicrobial resistance than another. Results from this study, though inconclusive, open the door for the necessary further research.