AI discovers new class of antibiotics to kill drug-resistant bacteria

Artificial intelligence has helped discover a new class of antibiotics that can treat infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria. This could help in the battle against antibiotic resistance, which was responsible for killing more than 1.2 million people in 2019 – a number expected to rise in the coming decades. Testing in mice showed that the new antibiotic compounds proved promising treatments for both Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus – a bacterium that has developed resistance to the drug typically used for treating MRSA infections. "Our [AI] models tell us not only which compounds have selective antibiotic activity, but also why, in terms of their chemical structure," says Felix Wong at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Massachusetts. Wong and his colleagues set out to show that AI-guided drug discovery could go beyond identifying specific targets that drug molecules can bind to, and instead predict the biological effect of entire classes of drug-like compounds.