Imagine you have 20 new compounds that have shown some effectiveness in treating a disease like tuberculosis (TB), which affects 10 million people worldwide and kills 1.5 million each year. You know that to treat the disease effectively, patients will need a combination of three or four drugs because TB bacteria behave differently in different environments—and in some cases, evolve to become drug-resistant.
How do you decide which drugs to test together? Twenty compounds in three- and four-drug combinations offer nearly 6,000 possible combinations.
