Can we predict the evolution of antibiotic resistance? Antibiotic resistance arises through evolutionary responses of bacteria, with higher rates of antibiotic use selecting for more resistance. Indeed, this intuition is empirically supported, with a positive linear relationship between antibiotic consumption and resistance frequency. However, recapitulating this empirical relationship has proven surprisingly challenging. Mathematical models of resistance transmission struggle to explain a key observation: how do sensitive and resistant strains co-exist in circulating bacterial populations?This talk will discuss our work tackling this problem and the challenges of confronting models with epidemiological data. I will also present how we are applying these mathematical models to understand the impact of vaccination on antibiotic resistance in a large-scale vaccine trial in Vietnam. This article was published on 2025-11-10
