Synergistic drug combinations are difficult and time-consuming to identify empirically. Here, we describe a method for identifying and validating synergistic small molecules.
Although antimicrobial drugs have dramatically increased the lifespan and quality of life in the 20th century, antimicrobial resistance threatens our entire society’s ability to treat systemic infections. In the United States alone, antibiotic-resistant infections kill approximately 23,000 people a year and cost around 20 billion USD in additional healthcare. One approach to combat antimicrobial resistance is combination therapy, which is particularly useful in the critical early stage of infection, before the infecting organism and its drug resistance profile have been identified. Many antimicrobial treatments use combination therapies. However, most of these combinations are additive, meaning that the combined efficacy is the same as the sum of the individual antibiotic efficacy. Some combination therapies are synergistic: the combined efficacy is much greater than additive. Synergistic combinations are particularly useful because they can inhibit the growth of antimicrobial drug resistant strains. However, these combinations are rare and difficult to identify. This is due to the sheer number of molecules needed to be tested in a pairwise manner: a library of 1,000 molecules has 1 million potential combinations. Thus, efforts have been made to predict molecules for synergy. This article describes our high-throughput method for predicting synergistic small molecule pairs known as the Overlap2 Method (O2M). O2M uses patterns from chemical-genetic datasets to identify mutants that are hypersensitive to each molecule in a synergistic pair but not to other molecules. The Brown lab exploits this growth difference by performing a high-throughput screen for molecules that inhibit the growth of mutant but not wild-type cells. The lab’s work previously identified molecules that synergize with the antibiotic trimethoprim and the antifungal drug fluconazole using this strategy. Here, the authors present a method to screen for novel synergistic combinations, which can be altered for multiple microorganisms.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause more than 2 million infections and 23,000 deaths annually in the United States according to the CDC1. New treatments are needed to overcome these infections. Strategies to identify these new treatments include the development of new antimicrobial drugs or the repurposing of small molecules approved for other conditions to treat microbial infections2,3,4. However, new drug discovery is very costly and time-consuming. Repurposing drugs may not identify novel drugs or drug targets5,6. Our lab focuses on a third strategy known as synergistic combination therapies. Synergistic combinations occur when two small molecules together have an efficacy greater than the additive effect of their individual efficacies7. Additionally, synergistic combinations can be effective against a pathogen resistant to one of the small molecules in the pair in addition to having less unwanted off-target effects, rendering them great potential8,9,10.
Synergistic pairs are rare, occurring in approximately 4-10% of drug combinations11,12,13. Thus, traditional techniques such as pairwise screens are challenging and time-consuming, with thousands of potential combinations from a small library of a hundred molecules. Moreover, synergistic interactions usually cannot be predicted from the activity of the compounds14. However, the authors developed a high-throughput approach to screen for synergistic pairs, called the Overlap2 Method (O2M)12. This method, described here, allows for faster, more efficient identification of these synergistic pairs. O2M requires the use of a known synergistic pair and a chemical-genetics dataset. Chemical-genetics datasets are generated when a library of knockout mutants is grown in the presence of many different small molecules. If one molecule in a known synergistic pair induces the same phenotype from a particular knockout mutant as the second synergistic molecule, any other small molecule that elicits the phenotype from that same mutant should also synergize with each member of the known synergistic pair. This rationale has been used in the Brown lab to identify synergistic antibiotic pairs active against Escherichia coli (E. coli) and synergistic antifungal drug pairs active against the pathogenic fungus Cryptococcus neoformans (C. neoformans)11,12. O2M is not only adaptable for various pathogens, but allows for the screening of large libraries of molecules to identify synergistic pairs easily and rapidly. Screening with the genetic mutant identified by O2M allows us to validate only those small molecules predicted for synergy. Thus, testing a 2,000-molecule library pairwise would take months, whereas if there were only 20 molecules in that library predicted to synergize, testing for synergy now takes a matter of days. O2M does not require programming skills, and the required equipment is available in most labs or core facilities. In addition to researchers interested in drug combinations, O2M analysis is of interest to anyone who has completed a drug screen and wants to expand their hits by identifying important drug-drug interactions. Below is the protocol for identifying synergistic small molecules in bacteria, as well as validating the predicted synergistic interactions in well-known assays15,16.
1. Identifying Synergy Prediction Mutants from Chemical-genetics Dataset by the Overlap2 Method (O2M)
NOTE: This is the method for identifying synergy prediction mutants using the published dataset from Nichols et al.17 で E. coli. However, this can be done on any chemical-genetics dataset and microorganism. These data sets contain a library of knockout mutants grown in the presence of more than 100 small molecules, giving a quantitative growth score for each mutant in each small molecule. One synergistic pair must be known, and there should be growth scores for both small molecules included in the dataset.
2. Predicting Synergizers within the Chemical-genetics Dataset by O2M
3. Validation of Predicted Synergistic Interactions
4. High-throughput Screen with Synergy Prediction Mutants to Identify Novel Synergistic Pairs
Checkerboard assays are a semi-quantitative method for measuring synergistic interactions. The final score output, FICI, determines if a drug combination is considered synergistic (FICI ≤0.5), non-interacting (0.5 <FICI <4), or antagonistic (FICI ≥4.0). Figure 1 illustrates how to set up the drug gradients in a checkerboard assay. Figure 2 illustrates common outcomes. Consider growth (purple wells) which display less than 90% growth inhibition. After measuring the OD600 of each well in a plate, we normalize everything to the no drug control well. Anything with a normalized value >0.1 (10% of the OD600 of the control well) is scored as "growth". FICI scores can vary depending on which well is picked; we select the well that gives the lowest FICI for each plate. In Figure 2A, that would be well F9 (columns are numbered, rows lettered), with an FICI = 0.07. In Figure 2B, the FICI is calculated from well C3 (FICI = 1.0). For antagonistic interactions, look for the highest FICI score possible. In Figure 2C, the FICI is calculated from well A1, which give an FICI of 8.0.
Optimal screening conditions will prevent a high number of false positives from the screen, which saves time and money. When we optimized the synergy prediction mutants for the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, we tested the input drug (fluconazole), four known non-synergistic drugs (caffeine, climbazole, trimethoprim, and brefeldin A), and five of fluconazole's synergistic partners (rifamycin, myriocin, nigericin, rapamycin, and FK506, all discussed in Chandrasekaran, S. et al.18). Since we discovered these molecules through O2M analysis (sections 1 and 2), we expected the known synergizers to selectively inhibit the growth of synergy prediction mutant cells but not wild-type cells. To maximize the expected growth difference, we tested a range of concentrations for each small molecule, most of which were sub-inhibitory.
Example results are shown in Figure 3. A molecule that does not act synergistically with fluconazole, brefeldin A, inhibited wild-type and synergy prediction mutant growth only slightly, and approximately the same amount. Rifamycin (Figure 3B), the growth of the synergy prediction mutant (cnag_03917Δ) was inhibited, but wild-type cell growth was not. The greatest growth difference was between 32 and 49 h post-inoculation, so the timepoint for screening was in this range. Growth curves of the other synergistic and non-synergistic molecules resembled those of rifamycin and brefeldin A, respectively.
Figure 1: Depiction of Checkerboard Assay from step 3. The test drug and input drug gradients are illustrated in A and B, respectively. The final assay plate should appear as in C. Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.
Figure 2: Graphical results of Checkerboard Assay. Illustrations of synergistic, none, and antagonistic interactions are depicted in A, B, and C, respectively. Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.
Figure 3: Example data for identifying screening time. (A) Wild-type (green) and synergy prediction mutant (blue) of C. neoformans grown in the presence of a brefeldin A, a small molecule known to not synergize with fluconazole. Wild-type control (dark green) and drug treated (light green) have a similar difference in growth to the synergy prediction mutant control (dark blue) and drug treated (light blue). (B) Wild-type and synergy prediction mutant grown in the presence of rifamycin, a small molecule known to synergize with fluconazole. Wild-type control (dark green) and drug treated (light green) have a smaller growth difference than the synergy prediction mutant control (dark blue) and drug treated (light blue). The greatest difference is observed at 48 h for the known synergistic molecule and the difference is similar at that time point for the known non-synergistic molecule. Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.
Synergistic small molecule pairs can be a powerful tool in treating microbial infections, yet they have not reached their full clinical potential because synergistic pairs are challenging to identify. This paper describes a method for identifying synergistic pairs much faster than simple pairwise combinations. By using chemical-genetics datasets, O2M identifies mutants with gene knockouts that can then be used as a readout to screen large libraries of small molecules in order to predict synergistic pairs. The ability to predict small molecules allows for the high scalability of screens, which in turn makes for largescale identification of synergistic partners. After identifying synergistic pairs, one can elucidate the molecular mechanism underlying synergistic interactions, then rationally design additional synergistic pairs11.
O2M requires a chemical-genetic dataset and a known synergistic pair. Fortunately, chemical-genetics datasets are common for a variety of microbes19,20,21. The Brown lab previously demonstrated that O2M can successfully find synergistic pairs in both C. neoformans and E. coli11,12. This demonstrates that the broad impact O2M has as a scalable method that is broadly applicable to a variety of organisms. All steps listed here can be altered for the growth of a different microorganism with relatively similar results, thus making O2M a valuable tool for general identification of synergistic pairs. Several other groups are identifying synergistic combinations from chemical-genetics datasets by different analytical methods, although O2M requires the least programming knowledge of any of these methods. Each method identifies different sets of synergistic antibiotics or antifungals 18,22,23,24, suggesting that a large number of synergistic pairs remain to be discovered. O2M and other synergy prediction methods are also potentially applicable to mammalian systems, including identifying cancer drug combinations.
In sum, this method describes a fast way to screen for synergistic pairs from a chemical-genetics dataset. This method and others help synergistic pairs become a more feasible treatment option in clinics. Additionally, O2M's fast and generalized method proves it a valuable tool when seeking out synergistic small molecule pairs.
The authors have nothing to disclose.
This work was supported by a startup grant from the Department of Pathology, University of Utah to J.C.S.B.
Bioscreen C | instrument | Growth Curves USA | |
Synergy H1 | instrument | BioTek | |
M9 broth | reagent | Amresco | J863-500G |
Casamino Acids | reagent | Fisher Scientific | BP1424-500 |
Glucose | reagent | Sigma | G7021-10KG |
Nicotinic Acid | reagent | Alfa Aesar | A12683 |
Thiamine | reagent | Acros Organics | 148991000 |
CaCl2 Dihydrate | reagent | Fisher | C79-500 |
MgSO4 Heptahydrate | reagent | Fisher | M63-500 |
chemical-genetics dataset | dataset | examples include Nichols et al., Cell, 2011, Brown et al, Cell, 2014, and others cited in the text. | |
trimethoprim (example input drug; any can be used) | reagent | Fisher Scientific | ICN19552701 |
sulfamethoxazole (example test drug; any can be used) | reagent | Fisher Scientific | ICN15671125 |