Towards a unified approach in managing resistance to vaccines, drugs, and pesticides

Authors: ALYOKHIN, ANDREI - University Of Maine; Rosenthal, Benjamin; Weber, Donald; BAKER, MITCHELL - Queens College

Submitted to: Biological Reviews
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 12/10/2024
Publication Date: 1/14/2025
Citation: Alyokhin, A., Rosenthal, B.M., Weber, D.C., Baker, M. 2025. Towards a unified approach in managing resistance to vaccines, drugs, and pesticides. Biological Reviews. 100(3):1067-1082. https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.13174.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.13174

Interpretive Summary: Resistance to human control efforts, developing in populations of undesirable organisms, is a current and very important issue facing the humankind. It has wide ramifications ranging from economic sustainability to social justice. Resistance is also a basic evolutionary phenomenon across all taxa. It must be approached as such, not as a collection of case studies on management failures in disparate disciplines. Countering a dynamic and flexible evolutionary process requires a dynamic and flexible management approach. This could explain why vaccines are much less prone to selecting for resistance than are pesticides or antibiotics: the former enhance a sophisticated and plastic host immune response that attacks pathogens from different angles, while the latter usually interfere with a single function of their target organisms, and lack dynamic or flexible reactions to the responses in target organisms and their populations. Scaling this general vaccination mechanism from an organismal up to an ecosystem level will likely improve the sustainability of managing pests and pathogens with pesticides and drugs. However, doing so will also require shifting the emphasis from killing undesirable organisms to minimizing their damage, ideally using a variety of flexible tactics in a way that suits most stakeholders.

Technical Abstract: Everywhere, pests and pathogens evolve resistance to our control efforts, impairing human health and welfare. Developing sustainable solutions to this problem requires working with evolved immune and ecological systems, rather than against these evolutionary forces. We advocate a transdisciplinary approach to resistance based on an evolutionary foundation informed by the concepts of integrated pest management and One Health. Diverse, multimodal management approaches create a more challenging environment for the evolution of resistance. Given our permanent evolutionary and ecological relationships with pests and pathogens, responses to most biological threats to health and agriculture should seek sustainable harm reduction rather than eradication.