Treatment of infectious diseases is often long and requires patients to take drugs even after they have seemingly recovered. This is because of a phenomenon called persistence, which allows small fractions of the bacterial population to survive treatment despite being genetically susceptible. The surviving subpopulation is often below detection limit and therefore is empirically inaccessible but can ...

Background - Antibiotic treatments are often associated with a late slowdown in bacterial killing. This separates the killing of bacteria into at least two distinct phases: a quick phase followed by a slower phase, the latter of which is linked to treatment success. Current mechanistic explanations for the in vitro slowdown are either antibiotic persistence or heteroresistance. Persistence is defined ...

Optimizing drug therapies for any disease requires a solid understanding of pharmacokinetics (the drug concentration at a given time point in different body compartments) and pharmacodynamics (the effect a drug has at a given concentration). Mathematical models are frequently used to infer drug concentrations over time based on infrequent sampling and/or in inaccessible body compartments. Models are ...

Standardised management of tuberculosis may soon be replaced by individualised, precision medicineguided therapies informed with knowledge provided by the field of systems biology. Systems biology is a rapidly expanding field of computational and mathematical analysis and modelling of complex biological systems that can provide insights into mechanisms underlying tuberculosis, identify novel ...

Background: As antibiotic resistance creates a signifcant global health threat, we need not only to accelerate the development of novel antibiotics but also to develop better treatment strategies using existing drugs to improve their efcacy and prevent the selection of further resistance. We require new tools to rationally design dosing regimens from data collected in early phases of antibiotic ...