AI invents new antibiotics that could kill superbugs gonorrhoea and MRSA

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 (methicillin-resistant 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.