The global spread of drug-resistant bacteria has created an urgent need for new antibiotics (Shutterstock)
Researchers at McMaster University in Canada and Stanford University in America have invented a new model of artificial intelligence that can design billions of new antibiotic molecules that are inexpensive and easy to produce in the laboratory.
The global spread of drug-resistant bacteria has created an urgent need for new antibiotics, but even modern AI methods are limited in isolating promising chemical compounds, especially when researchers must also find ways to manufacture these new AI-guided drugs and test them in the world.
The study was published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, and the EurekAlert website wrote about it.
The researchers reported that they have developed a new artificial intelligence model called “SyntheMol,” which can design new antibiotics to stop the spread of “Acinetobacter baumannii,” which the World Health Organization has identified as one of the most dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world.
These bacteria are difficult to eradicate, and can cause pneumonia, meningitis and infect wounds, all of which can lead to death.
Through artificial intelligence, researchers arrived at 6 molecules that show strong antibacterial activity against bacteria, and are also non-toxic to humans, and therefore could be antibiotics.
“Not only does Synthymol design promising new drug candidate molecules, it also generates the recipe for how to make each new molecule,” said researcher James Zhou, an associate professor of biomedical data science at Stanford University. “Generating such recipes is a novel and game-changing approach because "Chemists don't know how to make molecules designed by artificial intelligence."
Source: Eurek Alert