[Sunset]

What I want to know is: Is there some kind of mode of attack we can use, such that when the bacteria develop a resistance to it, in order to have the resistance they must necessarily become vulnerable to something else.

If you have two or three of these things which are mutually linked. The bacteria can become resistant to one but will become vulnerable to the other.

I am however not a biologist, just a developer, so please excuse me if I am mistaken.

Is such a thing even possible? Is some one working on something like this?

[pc2g4d]

Sounds like a "no free lunch" theorem for molecular evolution.

It seems unlikely you could guarantee that the bacteria could never evolve a way around all the linked attacks, but maybe by making the most obvious solution to one of the attacks be exactly the thing that makes it vulnerable to the other attacks, you could make the hill to climb much steeper.

Extremely clever antibiotic engineering: experimentally determine the most common adaptations that protect against your antibiotic, and incorporate countermeasures to those adaptations in the antibiotic.

[btilly]

Discover how to do that and you would earn yourself a Nobel in medicine.

There are bacteria that are resistant to every known antibiotic that we have. Certain strains of MSRA and TB are the most scary.