Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 938

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 48 of the 48 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Synergistic drug combinations tend to improve therapeutically relevant selectivity

Open access
Lehár, Joseph, Krueger, Andrew S, Avery, William, Heilbut, Adrian M, Johansen, Lisa M, Price, E Roydon, Rickles, Richard J, Short III, Glenn F, Staunton, Jane E, Jin, Xiaowei, Lee, Margaret S, Zimmermann, Grant R, Borisy, Alexis A·2009·Nature Biotechnology

Abstract

Drug combinations are a promising strategy to overcome the compensatory mechanisms and unwanted off-target effects that limit the utility of many potential drugs. However, enthusiasm for this approach is tempered by concerns that the therapeutic synergy of a combination will be accompanied by synergistic side effects. Using large scale simulations of bacterial metabolism and 94,110 multi-dose experiments relevant to diverse diseases, we provide evidence that synergistic drug combinations are generally more specific to particular cellular contexts than are single agent activities. We highlight six combinations whose selective synergy depends on multitarget drug activity. For one anti-inflammatory example, we show how such selectivity is achieved through differential expression of the drugs' targets in cell types associated with therapeutic, but not toxic, effects and validate its therapeutic relevance in a rat model of asthma. The context specificity of synergistic combinations creates many opportunities for therapeutically relevant selectivity and enables improved control of complex biological systems.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/nbt.1549

Cites

48 of 48 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 48 references

Cited by

See all 938

Metadata

Authors
Lehár, J., Krueger, A. S., Avery, W., Heilbut, A. M., Johansen, L. M., Price, E. R., Rickles, R. J., Short III, G. F., Staunton, J. E., Jin, X., Lee, M. S., Zimmermann, G. R., & Borisy, A. A.
Venue
Nature Biotechnology
Published
2009-07
Volume
27
Issue
7
Pages
659-666
ISSN
  • 0733-222X (ISSN-L)
  • 1087-0156
  • 1546-1696
OpenAlex
W2044025814
Cited by
938
References
48
FWCI
27.04
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Synergistic drug combinations tend to improve therapeutically relevant selectivity. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/nbt.1549
The paper
Lehár, J., Krueger, A. S., Avery, W., Heilbut, A. M., Johansen, L. M., Price, E. R., Rickles, R. J., Short III, G. F., Staunton, J. E., Jin, X., Lee, M. S., Zimmermann, G. R., & Borisy, A. A. (2009). Synergistic drug combinations tend to improve therapeutically relevant selectivity. Nature Biotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.1549

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.