AI Creates New Antibiotic

This model was designed to look for chemical features that make molecules effective at killing E.coli in a process that involved training on 2,500 molecules including 1,700 FDA approved drugs and a set of 800 natural products with diverse structures and a range of bioactivities. Once trained it was tested on a library of 6,000 compounds, and the model picked out one molecule predicted to have strong antibacterial activity and chemical structure different from any existing antibiotics. Then using a different machine deep learning algorithm model the newly identified Halicin molecule was shown to likely have low toxicity to human cells.