Artificial Intelligence has discovered a powerful new antibiotic. A program based on artificial intelligence has discovered a new antibiotic against a multi-resistant bacterium, especially dangerous in a hospital environment. Announced in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, it is the result of researchers from MIT in Boston and McMaster University.
If developed for use in patients, the drug could help fight Acinetobacter baumannii, a species of bacteria often found in hospitals and can lead to pneumonia, meningitis and other serious infections. The microbe is also a leading cause of infections in wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Artificial intelligence uncovers powerful new antibiotic, study
“Acinetobacter can survive on hospital doorknobs and equipment for long periods and can pick up antibiotic resistance genes from the surrounding environment. Today it is very common to find strains of A. baumannii resistant to almost all antibiotics,” he explains Jonathan Stokesof McMaster University.
The researchers identified the new drug from a library of nearly 7,000 potential drug compounds using an AI system previously trained to assess whether a chemical compound inhibits the growth of A. baumannii. The analysis, which took less than two hours, initially yielded a selection of a few hundred potential molecules. Of these, the researchers chose 240 to be tested experimentally in the laboratory, focusing on compounds with structures different from those of existing antibiotics. Nine antibiotics emerged from these tests, including one very powerful one. This compound, initially studied as a potential drug for diabetes, proved to be extremely effective in killing A. baumannii, but had no effect on other species of bacteria, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae.
This “narrow-spectrum” killing ability is a desirable feature for antibiotics because it minimizes the risk of bacteria rapidly spreading resistance against the drug. Another benefit is that the drug would spare the beneficial bacteria that live in the human gut and help suppress opportunistic infections such as Clostridium difficile.