Since the 1970s, modern antibiotic discovery has been experiencing a lull. Now the World Health Organization has declared the antimicrobial resistance crisis as one of the top 10 global public health threats. When an infection is treated repeatedly, clinicians run the risk of bacteria becoming resistant to the antibiotics. But why would an infection return after proper antibiotic treatment? One well-documented possibility is that the bacteria are becoming metabolically inert, escaping detection of traditional antibiotics that only respond to metabolic activity. When the danger has passed, the bacteria return to life and the infection reappears. Tales of bacterial “sleeper-like” resilience are hardly news to the scientific community ancient bacterial strains dating back to 100 million years ago have been discovered in recent years alive in an energy-saving state on the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean.
In this case, researchers in the Collins Lab employed AI to speed up the process of finding antibiotic properties in known drug compounds. With millions of molecules, the process can take years, but researchers were able to identify a compound called semapimod over a weekend, thanks to AI’s ability to perform high-throughput screening.
Semapimod is an anti-inflammatory drug typically used for Crohn’s disease, and researchers discovered that it was also effective against stationary-phase Escherichia coli and Acinetobacter baumannii.
By Alex Ouyang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Article can be accessed on: phys.org