Tag: halicin
How Machines Learned to Discover Drugs
When I first became a doctor, I cared for an older man whom I’ll call Ted. He was so sick with pneumonia that he was struggling to breathe. His primary-care physician had prescribed one antibiotic after another, but his symptoms had only worsened; by the time I saw him in the hospital, he had a high fever and was coughing up blood. His lungs seemed to be infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacterium so hardy that few drugs can kill it. I placed an oxygen tube in his nostrils, and one of my colleagues inserted an I.V. into his arm. We decided to give him vancomycin, a last line of defense against otherwise untreatable infections.Ted recovered with astonishing speed. When I stopped by the next morning, he smiled and removed the oxygen tube, letting it dangle near his neck like a pendant. Then he pointed to the I.V. pole near his bed, where a clear liquid was dripping from a bag and into his veins.
“Where did that stuff come from?” Ted asked.
“The pharmacy,” I said.
“No, I mean, where did it come from?”
At the time, I could barely pronounce the names of medications, let alone hold forth on their provenance. “I’ll have to get back to you,” I told Ted. He was discharged before I could. But, in the years that followed, I often thought about his question. Every day, I administer medicines whose origins are a mystery to me. I occasionally meet a patient for whom I have no effective treatment to offer, and Ted’s inquiry starts to seem existential. Where do drugs come from, and how can we get more of them? Learn more
Explainable AI for Rational Antibiotic Discovery
Researchers now employ artificial intelligence (AI) models based on deep learning to make functional predictions about big datasets. While the concepts behind these networks are well established, their inner workings are often invisible to the user. The emerging area of explainable AI (xAI) provides model interpretation techniques that empower life science researchers to uncover the underlying basis on which AI models make such predictions.In this month’s episode, Deanna MacNeil from The Scientist spoke with Jim Collins from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn how researchers are using explainable AI and artificial neural networks to gain mechanistic insights for large scale antibiotic discovery. Learn more
Antibiotic identified by AI
Computational approaches are emerging as powerful tools for the discovery of antibiotics. A study now uses machine learning to discover abaucin, a potent antibiotic that targets the bacterial pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii. Learn more
Using AI, scientists find a drug that could combat drug-resistant infections
The machine-learning algorithm identified a compound that kills Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacterium that lurks in many hospital settings. Learn more