One in six laboratory-confirmed bacteria tested in 2023 proved resistant to antibiotic treatment, according to the World Health Organization. All were related to various common diseases. The proliferation of difficult-to-treat bacterial diseases represents a growing threat, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Antibiotic Resistance Surveillance Report. The report reveals that, between 2018 and 2023, antibiotic resistance increased by more than 40 percent in monitored pathogen-drug combinations, with an average annual increase of 5-15 percent. According to data reported by more than 100 countries to WHO's Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS), one in six laboratory-confirmed bacteria in 2023 proved resistant to antibiotic treatment, all related to various common diseases globally.

In a landmark discovery, a machine learning based AI has been used to uncover powerful new antibiotics that can kill resistant bacterial strains. Around 46,000 people dying each year in the UK alone from sepsis, with many cases being caused by antibiotic resistant bacteria that don't respond to treatment. The World Health Organisation has has identified several high-priority target pathogens that new antibiotics should target, but development of just one new drug can take years of research and millions of pounds in funding. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US have now successfully used an AI to discover new antibiotic drugs for the first time. The team trained the AI on a data set of known antimicrobial molecules and then set it loose on a vast pharmaceutical database to assess the potential of each drug as an antibiotic. The process dramatically cuts the cost and time needed for drug discovery.

The use of AI to discover medicine appears to be paying off. MIT scientists have revealed that their AI discovered an antibiotic compound, halicin (named after 2001's HAL 9000), that can not only kill many forms of resistant bacteria but do so in a novel way. Where many antibiotics are slight spins on existing medicine, halicin wipes out bacteria by wrecking their ability to maintain the electrochemical gradient necessary to produce energy-storing molecules. That's difficult for bacteria to withstand -- E. coli didn't develop any resistance in 30 days where it fought off the more conventional antibiotic cipofloxacin within three days. The team succeeded by developing a system that can find molecular structures with desired traits (say, killing bacteria) more effectively than past systems.