No more ‘sledgehammer’: As gonorrhea grows resistant to antibiotics, researchers look to bespoke treatments

With antibiotic resistance on the rise, the days when doctors and clinics could rely on one treatment to cure all gonorrhea cases may be waning.

In fact, clinicians may find that some of their patients respond best to drugs of the past. But how will they know which patients?

To answer that question, a handful of researchers and companies are trying to develop rapid, point-of-care diagnostics that would signal which drugs work for a given patient and permit clinicians to tailor treatment to the bacterial strain. A future, in other words, of bespoke treatment, in which a greater variety of drugs are used to treat a very common sexually transmitted disease — potentially prolonging