Questão 31 - UNIUBE Medicina 2020

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Powerful antibiotics discovered using AI

Escherichia coli bacteria, coloured green, in a scanning electron micrograph.

 

    A pioneering machine-learning approach has identified powerful new types of antibiotic from a pool of more than 100 million molecules — including one that works against a wide range of bacteria, including tuberculosis and strains considered untreatable. The researchers say the antibiotic, called halicin, is the first discovered with artificial intelligence (AI). Although AI has been used to aid parts of the antibiotic- -discovery process before, they say that this is the first time it has identified completely new kinds of antibiotic from scratch, without using any previous human assumptions. The work, led by synthetic biologist Jim Collins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is published in Cell.

    “The study is remarkable”, says Jacob Durrant, a computational biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “The team didn’t just identify candidates, but also validated promising molecules in animal tests”, he says. “What’s more, the approach could also be applied to other types of drugs, such as those used to treat cancer or neurodegenerative diseases”, says Durrant.

    Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is rising dramatically worldwide, and researchers predict that unless new drugs are developed urgently, resistant infections could kill ten million people per year by 2050. But over the past few decades, the discovery and regulatory approval of new antibiotics has slowed. “People keep finding the same molecules over and over,” says Collins. “We need novel chemistries with novel mechanisms of action.”

(Jo Marchant. www.nature.com, 20.02.2020. Adaptado.)

According to the first paragraph, the new antibiotic called halicin