新澳门开奖结果

Scientists Used AI To Develop Superbug-Killing Antibiotic

For decades, there has been a lack of new drugs to kill bacteria. This has more so become a problem as bacteria are constantly evolving and gaining resistance to the antibiotics in existence.

One of these hard-to-treat bacteria species is Acinetobacter baumannii. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has identified it as a 鈥渃ritical threat鈥�. There are other two species under the 鈥渃ritical鈥� category. That is Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacteriaceae.

The bacteria (Acinetobacter baumannii) mostly infects wounds and can cause pneumonia. It is or rather has been difficult to deal with since it can fend off many of the previously available antibiotics.

For ages, it has been a major concern in hospitals and care homes as it can survive on many surfaces including even medical equipment.

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However, this is no more as scientists have discovered a new antibiotic that can kill the bacteria with ease. The scientists responsible for this fete, claim they used an AI model to find or create the antibiotic.

How Was It Done?

By manually testing thousands of medications on Acinetobacter baumannii, the researchers were able to determine which ones could either slow it down or kill it.

This data was then fed into an unknown AI model in order to teach it the chemical properties of medications that could combat the troublesome bacterium.

Then, a list of 6,680 chemicals whose efficacy was unknown was fed into the AI. According to the findings published in Nature Chemical Biology, the AI needed only an hour and a half to generate a shortlist of 240 effective compounds.

Nine possible antibiotics were revealed after laboratory testing of the 240 compounds by the researchers. Of the nine, an extraordinarily strong antibiotic baucin was discovered.

“I’m excited that this work shows that we can use AI to help combat problematic pathogens such as Acinetobacter baumannii,” said Prof James Collins, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

AI in Medicine

While AI has been around for years, it has taken a significant lead development-wise in the past few years. It is getting more and more implemented in various industries and medicine is by no means getting left behind.

Dr. Jonathan Stokes, from McMaster University, said, “AI enhances the rate, and in a perfect world decreases the cost, with which we can discover these new classes of antibiotic that we desperately need.”

Combatting pathogens, however, is not the only field where AI has been applied in medicine. Scientists have used AI previously to predict the structure and architecture of almost every protein made by the human body.

This was done using an AI program known as AlphaFold and 350,000 proteins have been predicted so far as BBC reports.