Artificial Intelligence System Discovers New Antibiotics

According to foreign media reports, the use of artificial intelligence technology to find drugs seems to be achieving some returns. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have revealed that the latest artificial intelligence technology has discovered an antibiotic compound-halicin, which can not only kill many forms of resistance Medicinal bacteria, but also kill them in a novel way. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that the latest artificial intelligence technology has discovered an antibiotic compound, halicin, which not only kills many forms of drug-resistant bacteria, but also kills them in a novel way.

Many antibiotics are a slight improvement on existing drugs, and halicin destroys bacteria by destroying the ability of bacteria to maintain an electrochemical gradient, which is necessary to produce energy storage molecules, which is difficult for bacteria to resist. E. coli within 30 days Halicin does not develop any resistance, and it can defeat the more traditional antibiotic-ciprofloxacin (cipofloxacin) in 3 days.

The research team has successfully developed a system that can find the molecular structure with the desired characteristics more effectively than any system in the past. Unlike previous methods, artificial intelligence neural networks can automatically analyze molecular representations and map them into continuous vectors to predict their behavior. Once ready, the researchers will conduct artificial intelligence training on 2,500 molecules, including: 1,700 known drugs and 800 natural products. When studying the database of 6000 compounds, artificial intelligence found that halicin has a significant sterilization effect.

But people should not expect to get a prescription for halicin in a short time. The MIT has successfully used the drug to eradicate Bowmanella (this is a common infection among American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq). They hope to design antibiotics from scratch and modify existing drugs to improve their effectiveness or reduce their unexpected side effects. This is far from guaranteed to eliminate "super bacteria". However, if only some of them can be killed, Can successfully save many lives?