According to a May 25 press release, scientists at the Hamilton, Ontario-based McMaster University and the Boston-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered a new antibiotic using artificial intelligence (AI).
The press release states that “The researchers were responding to the urgent need for new drugs to treat Acinetobacter baumannii, identified by the World Health Organization as one of the world’s most dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Notoriously difficult to eradicate, A. baumannii can cause pneumonia, meningitis and infect wounds, all of which can lead to death.”
Further, “A. baumanni is usually found in hospital settings, where it can survive on surfaces for long periods. The pathogen is able to pick up DNA from other species of bacteria in its environment, including antibiotic-resistance genes.”
The study was published on May 25 in Nature Chemical Biology. The researchers, according to the release, say they used an AI algorithm to predict new structural classes of antibacterial molecules and identified a new antibacterial compound dubbed abaucin.
Jonathan Stokes, lead author on the paper and an assistant professor in McMaster’s Department of Biomedicine & Biochemistry was quoted in the release saying, “This work validates the benefits of machine learning in the search for new antibiotics.”
“Using AI, we can rapidly explore vast regions of chemical space, significantly increasing the chances of discovering fundamentally new antibacterial molecules,” he adds.
The researchers say that AI could be used to accelerate the discovery of other antibiotics to treat other challenging bacteria.
