MIT yesterday (August 14) announced that researchers at the university have used artificial intelligence (AI) to design “novel antibiotics” that could tackle antibiotic resistance for certain infections.
The drugs could prove successful in treating “a drug-resistant form of gonorrhoea and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)”, it said.
Read more: ‘Limited’ government progress on antimicrobial resistance threat, warns watchdog
MIT’s research team used “generative AI algorithms” to design “more than 36 million possible compounds and...screened them for antimicrobial properties”, the university explained.
They discovered that the “top candidates...[were] structurally distinct from any existing antibiotics”, it said.
One was “very effective at killing” gonorrhoea in a lab dish and a mouse model of drug-resistant infection and the other was “able to clear” a resistant MRSA skin infection in a mouse model, it added.
“New possibilities”
MIT said that Phare Bio, a nonprofit that is part of the project, is now “working on further modifying” the antibiotics to “make them suitable for additional testing”.
Termeer professor of medical engineering and science James Collins said that researchers are “excited about the new possibilities that this project opens up for antibiotics development”.
This work “shows the power of AI from a drug design standpoint and enables us to exploit much larger chemical spaces that were previously inaccessible”, he added.
Read more: AMR: Gonorrhoea diagnoses highest ‘since records began in 1918’
And MIT postdoc Aarti Krishnan explained that they “wanted to get rid of anything that would look like an existing antibiotic, to help address the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis in a fundamentally different way”.
It comes after the government warned last August that new antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea cases were on the rise with figures “the highest...since records began in 1918”.
Meanwhile, the National Audit Office (NAO) found in February that the UK remains “a long way from” plans made to “control, contain and mitigate” AMR.
It said at the time that the government had made “limited progress” on addressing the threat of AMR.
