Beyond Monotherapy: Why Antimicrobial Synergy Demands a Renaissance of Combinatorial Thinking

Antimicrobial resistance continues to advance faster than innovation, threatening to outpace all existing therapeutic options.Despite decades of coordinated global efforts, resistant infections caused more than 1.27 million deaths in 2019, and the number may rise to nearly two million by 2050 if current trends persist. 1 Here, I argue that combating antimicrobial resistance requires a deliberate shift from singleagent discovery to validated combinatorial therapeutics-a strategy grounded in traditional multi-agent frameworks and modern systems pharmacology.This editorial advocates a focused clinical and translational pathway that bridges empirical synergy with reproducible, regulatory-grade validation.Artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and traditional medical systems serve as enabling tools within this