Combination antibiotic

A combination antibiotic is one in which two ingredients are added together for additional therapeutic effect. One or both ingredients may be antibiotics.

Antibiotic combinations are increasingly important because of antimicrobial resistance. This means that individual antibiotics that used to be effective are no longer effective, and because of the absence of new classes of antibiotic, they allow old antibiotics to be continue to be used. In particular, they may be required to treat multiresistant organisms, such as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. Some combinations are more likely to result in successful treatment of an infection.