The progress in HCV therapy in the last three years is similar to the progress that took HIV therapy ∼14 years. We are at the brink of approval for an all-oral drug combination that is dosed once daily as a single pill, has >95% efficacy, and is well tolerated. This article summarizes the path to this success and the challenges still ahead.

Although the development of drugs of greater potency and efficacy confers on the physician increasing power to treat serious diseases, it also increases the number and seriousness of potential adverse effects and drug interactions which can occur. Most hospital patients receive more than one drug at a time, the average number often being greater than five (Smith, Seidl, and Cluff, 1966). The in...

The author discusses three multiple testing procedures for identifying the minimum efficacious doses in a balanced factorial combination drug trial. All of these procedures utilize the closed testing principle, and hence strongly control the overall error rate and satisfy the coherence property, that is, if a hypothesis is retained then any hypothesis implied by it is also retained. While coher...

This paper is concerned with the statistical analysis of data obtained in studies of the joint action of drugs. The three methods that are compared are illustrated on real data (1), using the statistical package SAS. It is argued that while the results obtained using these methods do not differ substantially, the method allowing for estimating simultaneously all required parameters is to be pre...

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing problem in nearly every infectious disease, but the extent and rate of increase of the problem varies widely with different pathogen-drug combinations. The rate of increase of resistance depends primarily on the availability of resistant variants and the intensity of selection imposed by antimicrobial treatment (appropriately measured). Declines in resistan...