Heteroresistance: A cause of unexplained antibiotic treatment failure?

Antibiotic resistance is a major and increasing healthcare problem that threatens many of the achievements of modern medicine. Transplants, chemotherapy, and survival of extremely premature infants all rely on the efficacy of antibiotics to fight off infection. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 2 million infections every year in the United States are caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, resulting in at least 23,000 deaths and US$55 billion in increased healthcare costs and lost productivity Without significant action, antibiotic-resistant infections could annually kill 10 million people worldwide by the year 2050, eclipsing the number of deaths caused by cancer and adding US$100 trillion to the world's healthcare costs by that time It is therefore critical to understand novel and often underrecognized mechanisms of resistance that represent barriers to antibiotic efficacy so as to combat them with new drugs and therapeutic approaches.