• They will, but there is also the chance that in gaining that new resistance, they may give up a different resistance, or become less lethal.

    That’s the hopeful side of things; unfortunately, it is not uncommon for bacteria to develop resistance to a full combination of antibiotics over time, but I can be hopeful.

    • resistance genes are often carried on transferable elements like transposons and plasmids, which often contain multi-gene cassettes encoding for many types of resistance. I would also like to be hopeful too, but every antibiotic we have developed has had resistance develop against it, also within multidrug resistant strains like MRSA and CRAB. I think we should be hopeful for phage therapy, as well as AB + phage combination therapy. I think relying purely on antibiotics is a bit of a dead end.