A I-designed compounds can kill drug-resistant bacteria

An MIT team used artificial intelligence to design novel antibiotics, two of which showed promise against MRSA and gonorrhea. With help from artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have designed novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat bacteria: multi-drug-resistant and (MRSA). The team used two approaches. First, they directed generative AI to design molecules based on a chemical fragment their model had predicted would show antimicrobial activity, and second, they let the algorithms generate molecules without constraints. They designed more than 36 million possible compounds this way and computationally screened them for antimicrobial properties. The top candidates they discovered are structurally distinct from any existing antibiotics, and they appear to work by novel mechanisms that disrupt bacterial cell membranes.