5.1 Resistance breakers

Existing antibiotics can be made more effective by co-administering antibiotics with resistance breakers – drugs that do not kill bacteria themselves but instead help an antibiotic to overcome resistance. One advantage of using failing antibiotics is that they have already been safety-tested, so development time and costs will be lower. However, this may only be a short-term fix because resistance is likely to develop to these drug combinations too (Garner, 2016).