Developing new antibiotics presents a complicated challenge, but scientists are now using artificial intelligence to design new drugs to address the problem. In May researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and McMaster University published a study on their use of an AI algorithm to identify an antibiotic that can kill a particularly resistant type of bacterium. The pathogen, called Acinetobacter baumannii, can lead to serious infections, including meningitis and pneumonia, and is often found in hospital settings. It’s also a leading cause of infections in military personnel in the Middle East.
The findings are significant because they show how AI can be used to hasten the development of new antibiotics to fight drug-resistant bacteria. Using AI and machine learning—the subset of AI that involves using algorithms to find patterns in data—dramatically reduces the number of experiments that humans would need to screen a potential drug for efficacy. It also greatly reduces the cost because the computer modeling weeds out compounds that aren’t promising.
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