- A deep-learning model identifies a powerful new drug that can kill many species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. (news.mit.edu)
Over the past few decades, very few new antibiotics have been developed, and most of those newly approved antibiotics are slightly different variants of existing drugs. Current methods for screening new antibiotics are often prohibitively costly, require a significant time investment, and are usually limited to a narrow spectrum of chemical diversity…In this case, the researchers designed their model to look for chemical features that make molecules effective at killing E. coli… This molecule…halicin…The researchers…found that it was able to kill many that are resistant to treatment, including Clostridium difficile, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis…“This groundbreaking work signifies a paradigm shift in antibiotic discovery and indeed in drug discovery more generally,”…READ MORE
