Artificial intelligence can now design new antibiotics in a matter of days
Imagine you’re a scientist who needs to discover a new antibiotic to fight off a scary disease. How would you go about finding it?
Typically, you’d have to test lots and lots of different molecules in the lab until you find one that has the necessary bacteria-killing properties. You might find some contenders that are good at killing the bacteria only to realize that you can’t use them because they also prove toxic to humans. It’s a very long, very expensive, and probably very aggravating process.
But what if, instead, you could just type into your computer the properties you’re looking for and have your computer design the perfect molecule for you?
That’s the general approach IBM researchers are taking, using an AI system that can automatically generate the design of molecules for new antibiotics. In a new paper, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering,the researchers detail how they’ve already used it to quickly design two new antimicrobial peptides — small molecules that can kill bacteria — that are effective against a bunch of different pathogens in mice.
Normally, this molecule discovery process would take scientists years. The AI system did it in a matter of days.
That’s great news, because we urgently need faster ways to create new antibiotics.
When new antibiotics are introduced, they can have great, even lifesaving results. Since penicillin was discovered in 1928, kicking off the modern era of antibiotics, we’ve come to rely on them to treat killers like tuberculosis and to keep us safe when we undergo procedures like C-sections or joint replacements.
But experts have warned that we’re now entering a post-antibiotic era — a time when our existing antibiotics are becoming pretty much useless. We’ve created this crisis by overusing antibiotics in the treatment of crops, farm animals, and humans.
The more we overuse antibiotics, the more bacteria have a chance to adapt to our drugs, morphing into antibiotic-resistant superbugs that render our drugs ineffective.
And according to a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated the problem. Doctors have been even more inclined to unnecessarily prescribe antibiotics to patients. Even though Covid-19 is a viral illness and antibiotics don’t work on viruses, doctors have been giving patients these drugs to protect against secondary infections while they’re in the hospital — even before they know if the patients have infections or not.
Nowadays, in the time it takes you to read this article, one person in the US will die from an infection that antibiotics can no longer treat effectively because of our antibiotic overuse. And over the course of the year, 700,000 people around the world will die from drug-resistant infections. That annual death toll could rise to 10 million by 2050, a major UN report warned, unless we make some radical changes.
Big Pharma and biotech companies haven’t been creating new antibiotics because it takes many years and lots of funding to do the research and development. Most new compounds fail. Even when they succeed, the payoff is small: An antibiotic doesn’t sell as well as a drug that needs to be taken daily. For many pharma companies, the financial incentive just isn’t there.
But if you can use AI to do this work quickly and cheaply? Well, that just might change the calculus.
IBM’s new AI system relies on something called a generative model. To understand it at its simplest level, we can break it down into three basic steps.
First, the researchers start with a massive database of known peptide molecules.
