AI system predicts medicine's hidden powers

Treatments for new or drug-resistant infectious diseases may already be in our medicine cabinets, say the molecular biologists responsible for developing an artificial-intelligence system that can predict unknown antibiotic properties of existing drugs. The hope is that the work will result in an armoury of new treatments that can be rushed into service when standard treatments stop being effective or new pathogens arise. "In the case of new infectious diseases, there might be no time to develop a completely new drug from the ground up," says Artem Cherkasov of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, who made the proposal this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, Massachusetts. However, if the new AI system suggests an existing drug might be an effective antibiotic, it could be quickly tested for efficacy, and then pushed into service, Cherkasov says. And because these drugs would have already been approved for use in people, they wouldn't have to go through all the clinical trials and lengthy regulatory approvals required of brand-new drugs.