We have seen some of the most promising use cases of the Artificial intelligence system in the healthcare field recently. In one such example, Google's AI lab DeepMind employed the futuristic tech to accurately detect the disease in Breast Cancer patients. Bacteria has increasingly become resistant to antibiotic drugs over the years as infections have become more dangerous. This has been amply manifested in the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Efforts seem to be gathering pace to find a vaccination or cure for the disease which has rocked the World.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has proved to be a useful ally in the battle against antibiotic resistance. A powerful antibiotic that's even able to kill superbugs has been discovered thanks to a machine-learning algorithm Researchers from MIT used a novel computer algorithm to sift through a vast digital archive of over 100 million chemical compounds and spot those that were able to kill bacteria using different mechanisms from existing drugs. Reported in the journal Cell, this method highlighted a molecule that appeared to possess some truly remarkable antibiotic properties. The team named the molecule halicin, a hat tip to the sentient AI system "Hal" from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. When tested in mice, halicin was able to effectively treat tuberculosis and drug-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, the family of bacteria that includes E. coli and Salmonella.

WASHINGTON – In a first, U.S. researchers have used artificial intelligence to identify a powerful new antibiotic capable of killing several drug-resistant bacteria. Antibiotics have been a cornerstone of modern medicine since the discovery of penicillin, but their effectiveness has seriously diminished in recent years as overuse has led to bacteria becoming resistant. The scientists at MIT and Harvard trained a machine-learning algorithm to analyze compounds capable of fighting infections using different mechanisms than those of existing drugs. Their findings were published in the journal Cell. "Our approach revealed this amazing molecule, which is arguably one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered," said James Collins, a professor of medical engineering at MIT and one of the paper's senior authors.

A pioneering machine-learning approach has identified powerful new types of antibiotic from a pool of more than 100 million molecules -- including one that works against a wide range of bacteria, including tuberculosis and strains considered untreatable. The researchers say the antibiotic, called halicin, is the first discovered with artificial intelligence (AI). Although AI has been used to aid parts of the antibiotic-discovery process before, they say that this is the first time it has identified completely new kinds of antibiotic from scratch, without using any previous human assumptions. The work, led by synthetic biologist Jim Collins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is published in Cell1. The study is remarkable, says Jacob Durrant, a computational biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The team didn't just identify candidates, but also validated promising molecules in animal tests, he says.

A powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in the world has been discovered using artificial intelligence. The drug works in a different way to existing antibacterials and is the first of its kind to be found by setting AI loose on vast digital libraries of pharmaceutical compounds. Tests showed that the drug wiped out a range of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, including Acinetobacter baumannii and Enterobacteriaceae, two of the three high-priority pathogens that the World Health Organization ranks as "critical" for new antibiotics to target. "In terms of antibiotic discovery, this is absolutely a first," said Regina Barzilay, a senior researcher on the project and specialist in machine learning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "I think this is one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered to date," added James Collins, a bioengineer on the team at MIT. "It has remarkable activity against a broad range of antibiotic-resistant pathogens."