Artificial intelligence may be able to cure diseases once thought to be incurable. AI is said to be unlocking new treatments and inventing new drugs against Parkinson’s disease, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and many other rare diseases.
The Real Threat Is Artificial Credit, Not Artificial Intelligence
This is technological progress that many scientists never thought possible.
“We can – in a matter of days or hours – look at massive libraries” of chemical compounds to identify those that display antibacterial activity, says James Collins, professor of medical engineering and science, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US. With the help of AI, Collins and his team have already discovered two new compounds that could prove to be vital weapons against highly drug-resistant infections such as gonorrhoea and MRSA, accoridng to a report by BBC.
Antibiotic resistance has been rising in recent years, as diseases that were once easy to treat are becoming increasingly difficult to treat. For around half a century, humanity has been slowly losing its battle against bacteria. The most powerful weapons we have in this fight, antibiotics, are increasingly ineffective as drug resistance spreads. Around 1.1 million people now die every year from infections that were, until recently, easily treated. And the death toll is expected to rise to more than eight million by 2050 unless urgent action is taken.
Developing new antibiotics is a frustratingly slow and expensive process. Between 2017 and 2022, just 12 new antibiotics were approved for use, the majority of which were similar to existing drug types that bacteria are already developing resistance to. The field has been chronically neglected due to a lack of interest from drug companies and underfunding. –BBC
Collins and his team have trained a generative AI model to recognize the chemical structures of known antibiotics. This has allowed the algorithm to learn what it takes to kill those bacteria. The researchers then used the AI to screen more than 45 million chemical structures for their ability to target Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes gonorrhoea, and Staphylococcus aureus, a significant cause of infections, including MRSA.
By using the power of AI, researchers hope to save time developing new treatments and drugs that could help cure what was once thought incurable.