AI Impact Awards 2025: How 7 Health Care Winners Measure Impact
In 2020, researchers at the Collins Lab at MIT made a landmark discovery when they used AI to identify a new class of antibiotics. Phare Bio was born from that breakthrough, and has since leveraged AI to uncover two additional novel antibiotic classes.The company's model prioritizes the superbugs identified as the most dangerous by the CDC and the WHO, and predicts drug efficacy, toxicity and pharmacokinetics with high accuracy. Phare Bio has also developed AIBiotics, a generative AI platform that designs new antibiotics.
Ultimately, the company aims to improve the efficiency of antibiotic research and development, according to Dr. Akhila Kosaraju, its president and CEO.
How does it measure that? Ultimately, by "taking better and fewer shots on goal," Kosaraju told Newsweek. It often costs between $1.3 and $1.5 billion to get a single drug over the finish line for FDA approval.
"Those numbers are so high [because they] encompass all of the failures along the way to get to that one exceptional drug," Kosaraju said. "If we can reduce the number of shots on goal substantially, we can half or quarter the cost and time to get these drugs into clinical trials, and then ultimately to be FDA-approved."
To see the full list of AI Impact winners, visit the official page for Newsweek's AI Impact Awards.
