Failure and Success in Single-Drug Control of Antimicrobial Resistance
Populations and Evolution
2026-01-08 v2
Abstract
We propose a mathematical model of Antimicrobial Resistance in the host to predict the failure of two antagonists of bacterial growth: the immune response and a single-antibiotic therapy. After characterising the initial bacterial load that cannot be cleared by the immune system alone, we define the success set of initial conditions for which an infection-free equilibrium can be reached by a viable single-antibiotic therapy, and we provide a rigorously defined inner approximation of the set. For initial conditions within the success set, we propose an optimal control framework to design single-drug therapies.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.09616,
title = {Failure and Success in Single-Drug Control of Antimicrobial Resistance},
author = {Alejandro Anderson and Rami Katz and Francesca Calà Campana and Giulia Giordano},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.09616},
year = {2026}
}