A powerful antibiotic discovered thanks to AI

September 23, 2022

By 2050, antimicrobial resistance could kill millions of people, according to OECD estimates. However, a major breakthrough has just been made by researchers from MIT and Harvard. Using artificial intelligence tools, they discovered a new molecule that would be the most powerful antibiotic ever discovered.

The antibiotics currently in use are already old, and the traditional process of discovering new ones is expensive and cumbersome. Theartificial intelligence (IA) allows to search, "in silico", that is to say by modelization computing, which chemical molecules would be able to attack certain bacteria, by having libraries of chemical compounds examined by AI.

" We wanted to develop a platform to harness the power of artificial intelligence to open a new era of antibiotic drug discoverysays James Collins, professor of medical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), co-author of this discovery published Thursday in the review Cell. Our approach has revealed this molecule incredible which is arguably the most powerful antibiotic ever discovered ".

A long-awaited major breakthrough

AI makes it possible to widen the field of drug candidates to molecules that researchers did not suspect. The idea hasn't been new for decades, but so far, the methods haven't been refined enough to really find effective molecules. Researchers trained their model from bacteria Escherichia coli, then searched a library of 6,000 chemical compounds which had the desired characteristics. The algorithm found a compound with a different structure from existing antibiotics, and predicted that it would be effective against many bacteria.

They baptized the molecule " halicin ", In homage tocomputer Movie hal 2001, the Space Odyssey, then tested it in the laboratory against dozens of bacterial strains taken from patients and cultivated in vitro. Halicin has successfully killed many bacteria resistant to existing antibiotics, including Clostridium difficult, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Only the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa resisted him.

Finally, the new molecule was tested on mice infected with A. baumannii, a bacteria that has infected many american soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and which resists all existing antibiotics. The mice were cured in 24 hours.

The authors hope that their model will strengthen the entire antibiotic arsenal, while the resistance antibiotics is a subject of global concern for health authorities. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently considered that resistant bacteria could kill 2.4 million people in Europe, North America and Australia by 2050.

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