Technology

The original press release from MIT news is here: https://news.mit.edu/2023/using-ai-mit-researchers-identify-antibiotic-candidates-1220

Paper the press release refers to: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/153216

The lab this is being worked on: https://www.collinslab.mit.edu/

The paper as listed on the lab's website: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c264953620b850c9fb03732/t/658331812865e60a33af40ea/1703096709558/nature_wong.pdf

The audacious project: https://www.audaciousproject.org/grantees/collins-lab

I think we should cultivate a habit of linking to the original material

Just a reminder that we don't have new antibiotics because it's so difficult to develop them. We don't have new ones because they don't make very much money for companies. Antibiotics are too important to leave up to capitalism.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A new class of antibiotics for drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria which was discovered using more transparent deep learning models.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is proving to be a game-changer when it comes to medicine with the technology now helping scientists to unlock the first new antibiotics in 60 years.

"Our work provides a framework that is time-efficient, resource-efficient, and mechanistically insightful, from a chemical-structure standpoint, in ways that we haven’t had to date".

These models consist of very large numbers of calculations that mimic neural connections, and no one really knows what's going on underneath the hood," said Felix Wong, a postdoc at MIT and Harvard and one of the study’s lead authors.

By integrating these toxicity predictions with the previously determined antimicrobial activity, the researchers pinpointed compounds capable of effectively combating microbes with minimal harm to the human body.

The models identified compounds from five different classes, categorised based on specific chemical substructures within the molecules, that exhibited predicted activity against MRSA.

The original article contains 567 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

It would be better if they gave their AI the task of finding alternatives to antibiotics.

While antibiotic resistance gets all the attention, the damage being done to our host-native microbiomes is arguably as big a threat as climate change, as the damage compounds over generations, and once it's gone you can't get it back. (Apr 2019).