25-09 - Flipbook - Page 128
Mi n i str i es
AI designs antibiotics for gonorrhoea
and MRSA superbugs
Artificial intelligence has invented two new potential antibiotics that could kill drug-resistant
gonorrhoea and MRSA, researchers have revealed. The drugs were designed atom-byatom 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. Now, the MIT team have
gone one step further by using generative AI to design antibiotics in the first place for the
sexually transmitted infection gonorrhoea and for potentially-deadly MRSA (methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus).
Their study, published in the journal Cell, interrogated 36 million compounds including those
that either do not exist or have not yet been discovered. 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
James Gallagher
