AI Reveals A Fresh Medicine That Kills Superbugs

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used by researchers to find a novel antibiotic that can eradicate a dangerous species of superbug.

Thousands of possible substances were reduced using artificial intelligence (AI) to a small number that could be evaluated in a lab.

Abaucin, a strong experimental antibiotic that was the end result, needs to undergo more testing before it can be utilised.

AI has the potential to significantly speed up the search for novel medicines, according to academics in Canada and the US.

It is the most recent illustration of how artificial intelligence’s tools can revolutionise both science and medicine.

AI innovation could lead to a medical revolution.

Preventing superbugs
Bacteria are killed by antibiotics. Since there haven’t been any brand-new medications for decades, it’s getting more difficult to treat bacteria because they develop resistance to the ones we do have.

Antibiotic-resistant diseases are thought to cause more than a million fatalities annually.

The Acinetobacter baumannii strain, which can infect wounds and cause pneumonia, was the focus of the researchers’ attention.

One of the three superbugs the World Health Organisation has classified as a “critical” threat may go unnoticed by you.

It is an issue in hospitals and nursing homes because it may thrive on surfaces and medical equipment and frequently resist repeated antibiotics.

Since it is “really common” to uncover cases of the virus that are “resistant to nearly every antibiotic,” Dr. Jonathan Stokes from McMaster University refers to the bacterium as “public enemy number one.”

Synthetic intelligence
The researchers had to initially train the AI in order to locate a new antibiotic. They painstakingly tested thousands of medications with known chemical structures on Acinetobacter baumannii to discover which could slow it down or kill it.

The AI was given this data so it could understand the chemical properties of medications that could combat the troublesome microbe.

Then, a list of 6,680 chemicals whose efficacy was unknown was subjected to the AI. The findings, which were reported in Nature Chemical Biology, revealed that the AI needed an hour and a half to create a shortlist.

In 240 samples evaluated in the lab, the researchers discovered nine promising antibiotics. The extraordinarily strong antibiotic baucin was one of them.

Laboratory tests revealed that it could destroy patient samples of A. baumannii and treat infected wounds in mice.

Dr. Stokes, however, informed me that “this is when the work starts.”

The medicine must then be refined in the lab before going through clinical trials. He predicts that it may not be until 2030 before the first artificial intelligence antibiotics are prescribed.

Curiously, this experimental antibiotic solely affects A. baumannii and has no effect on any other bacterial species.

Numerous antibiotics indiscriminately kill microorganisms. The precision of abaucin, according to the researchers, will make it more difficult for drug resistance to develop and may result in fewer adverse effects.

Tens of millions of possible molecules may theoretically be screened by the AI, which is a task that would be difficult to complete humanly.

According to Dr. Stokes, “AI accelerates and, in a perfect world, lowers the cost with which we can discover these new classes of antibiotics that we desperately need.”

In 2020, the researchers used E. coli to test the fundamentals of AI-assisted antibiotic discovery; however, they are now concentrating on the major baddies. Following that, they intend to examine Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Prof. James Collins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology commented, “This finding further supports the idea that AI can significantly accelerate and expand our search for novel antibiotics.”

“I’m thrilled that this work demonstrates that we can use AI to help combat problematic pathogens like A. baumannii,” he continued.

Prof. Dame Sally Davies, a government representative on anti-microbial resistance and a former chief medical officer for England, said on Radio 4’s The World Tonight: “We’re onto a winner.”

She referred to the use of AI as “a big game-changer; I’m thrilled to see the work he (Dr. Stokes) is doing; it will save lives,” and she called it “a work of genius.”