Photo: MCMASTER UNIVERSITY / copyright
With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), a group of scientists discovered a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug.
AI made it possible to reduce a list of thousands of chemical compounds to a few that were analyzed in the laboratory.
The result was a powerful experimental antibiotic called abaucinwhich must be subjected to new tests before being used as a treatment.
Researchers in Canada and the United States say that AI has the power to vastly accelerate the discovery of new drugs.
It is the latest example of how this tool can be a revolutionary force in science and medicine.
stop superbugs
Antibiotics kill bacteria. However, for decades there has been a need for new and bacteria will they have returned increasingly difficult to treat, as they develop resistance to antibiotics that we already have.
It is estimated that more than one million people a year die from infections caused by agents that are resistant to antibiotic treatment.
The researchers focused on one of the most problematic species of bacteria: the Acinetobacter baumanniiwhich can infect wounds and cause pneumonia.
Although you don’t often hear about it, It is one of the three superbugs that the World Health Organization identifies as a “critical” threat.
It is often capable of ignoring multiple antibiotics and causing problems in hospitals and nursing homes, where it can survive on medical surfaces and equipment.
Dr. Jonathan Stokes, a researcher at McMaster University in Canada, describes this superbug as the “public enemy number one”since it is “really common” to find cases in which it is “resistant to almost all antibiotics”.
Artificial intelligence
To find the new antibiotic, the researchers first trained the AI. They took thousands of drugs for which the precise chemical structure was known and manually tested them on Acinetobacter baumannii, to identify which one could slow down or kill the superbug.
This information was fed into the AI so that it learned the chemical characteristics of the drugs that could attack the bacteria.
Then, the AI returned a list of 6,680 compounds whose efficacy was unknown. The results, published in the scientific journal Nature Chemical Biologyshowed that the tool took an hour and a half to produce a shortlist.
The researchers tested 240 in the lab and found nine potential antibiotics. One of them was the powerful antibiotic abaucin.
Laboratory experiments have shown that it can treat infected wounds in mice and kill A. baumannii samples in patients.
“This is where the work begins,” Stokes said.
The next step is to refine the drug in the laboratory and then conduct clinical trials.
Stokes cautions that the first antibiotics discovered with the help of AI may be prescribed until 2030.
Interestingly, this experimental antibiotic had no effect on other species of bacteria and only works on A. baumannii.
Many antibiotics kill bacteria indiscriminately. The researchers believe that abaucin’s precision will make it more difficult for drug resistance to develop and could lead to fewer side effects.
In principle, AI could detect tens of millions of potential compounds, which cannot be done manually.
“AI increases the rate and, in a perfect world, reduces the cost of discovering these new classes of antibiotics that we desperately need,” Stokes said.
Researchers tested the use of AI in antibiotic discovery with the bacteria E.coli in 2020, but now they plan to focus on other infectious agents: Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
“This finding further supports the premise that AI can significantly accelerate and expand our search for new antibiotics.”said Professor James Collins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I am excited that this work will help us show that we can use AI to combat problematic pathogens such as A. baumannii“he added.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss out on our best content.
- Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!
See original article on BBC