Artificial Intelligence Discovers Potent Antibiotic

Although earlier AI-based models required human supervision and produced inconsistent results, reports STAT, this new deep learning approach was trained on a library of more than 2,000 chemical compounds with something known about their antibacterial potency, using those data to predict function based on structure. The platform identified molecules that looked quite different from existing antibiotics, overcoming the bias that human researchers exhibit when they search for potential anti-bacterial compounds that have structures similar to existing antibiotics, according to STAT.