“MIT researchers used generative AI to create two entirely new antibiotics that killed drug-resistant gonorrhea and MRSA in infected mice,” reports The Doomslayer.
The BBC says:
Artificial intelligence has invented two new potential antibiotics that could kill drug-resistant gonorrhea and MRSA….The drugs were designed atom-by-atom by the AI and killed the superbugs in laboratory and animal tests.
The two compounds still need years of refinement and clinical trials before they could be prescribed.
But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team behind it say AI could start a ‘second golden age’ in antibiotic discovery.
Antibiotics kill bacteria, but infections that resist treatment are now causing more than a million deaths a year. Overusing antibiotics has helped bacteria evolve to dodge the drugs’ effects, and there has been a shortage of new antibiotics for decades.
Researchers have previously used AI to trawl through thousands of known chemicals in an attempt to identify ones with potential to become new antibiotics…..Scientists trained the AI by giving it the chemical structure of known compounds alongside data on whether they slow the growth of different species of bacteria. The AI then learns how bacteria are affected by different molecular structures, built of atoms such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen.
Two approaches were then tried to design new antibiotics with AI. The first identified a promising starting point by searching through a library of millions of chemical fragments, eight to 19 atoms in size, and built from there. The second gave the AI free rein from the start.
The design process also weeded out anything that looked too similar to current antibiotics [and] anything predicted to be toxic to humans.
After they were developed, the leading designs were tested first on bacteria in the lab and then on mice infected with gonorrhea and MRSA, yielding two new potential drugs.
Artificial intelligence is detecting cases of prostate cancer and breast cancer that radiologists overlook.
Artificial intelligence is also being used to generate highly-effective antibodies to fight disease.
Scientists are using artificial intelligence to identify the trillions of viruses that live within human beings.
Viruses can be useful. Scientists have engineered a virus to steal proteins from the HIV virus, potentially eliminating AIDS.
A virus is being used to cure deafness in new gene therapy. Researchers also discovered that a plant virus could be used to save crops from root-eating pests.
