Combination Therapy - Uses For Combination Therapy

Uses For Combination Therapy

Conditions treated with combination therapy include tuberculosis, leprosy, cancer, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. One major benefit of combination therapies is that they reduce development of drug resistance, since a pathogen or tumor is less likely to have resistance to multiple drugs simultaneously. Artemisinin-based monotherapies for malaria are explicitly discouraged to avoid the problem of developing resistance to the newer treatment.

Combination therapy may seem costlier than monotherapy in the short term, but when used appropriately, it causes significant savings: lower treatment failure rate, lower case-fatality ratios, slower development of resistance and consequently, less money needed for the development of new drugs.