Artificial Intelligence Discovers First Antibiotics (Halicin Antibiotics)
Have Artificial intelligence become what you hear on a daily basis for months or years repeatedly? Do not get tired of this technology as you will be hearing more about this technological innovation that will be disrupting several sectors.
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Artificial intelligence has done it again as it discovers an antibiotic that can kill so many dangerous drug-resistant bacteria. Using machine learning, a group of researchers Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Regina Barzilay, Professor Tommi Jaakkola, their students (Kevin Yang, Kyle Swanson, and Wengong Jin) were able to train an Artificial intelligence to understand 2500 molecules which included 1700 of FDA-Approved drugs and 800 natural products which were consumable by humans for bioactivities. The algorithm was made to tell the molecular function of a
The use of artificial intelligence to discover an entirely new molecule was made to learn how to predict the molecular functions of drugs without any assumptions on how the drugs work or without any labels on the drugs to serve as a clue. With that the machine was made to screen through the Drug Research Hub which contained 6000 molecules. After screening, the machine was able to come out with a unique molecule which was predicted to have strong antibacterial activity and whose chemical structure was different other antibiotics that existed.
The discovery was said to be the first by an artificial intelligence in terms antibiotic discovery, and is believed to be one of the most powerful antibiotics that have been produced till date having a broad range against several antibiotic-resistant pathogen.
Bacteria starts to resist antibiotics when they mutate and evolve to sidestep the mechanisms that antimicrobial drugs uses to kill them
After the artificial intelligence (AI) came out with the antibiotics, the researchers named it ‘Halicin’ after Hal, the astronaut-bothering artificial intelligence (AI) in the 2001 science fiction movie ‘A Space Odyssey’. The drug is said to be able to inhibit the growth of several bacteria in the lab. Test on Bacteria collected from patients showed that the Halicin can kill Mycobacterium tuberculosis the causative agent for tuberculosis, strains of Enterobacteriaceae, Clostridium difficile and several other species of bacteria with the exception of Pseudomonas aeruginosa a lung pathogen that is difficult to treat.
Halicin was effective in living animal and to prove that, the researchers tested it on a mice with A. baumannii, a bacteria that has infected a lot of U.S. soldiers who were stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The strain of bacteria has been resistant to all known antibiotics but was killed within 24 hours with the introduction Halicin.
Further investigation
The drug hasn’t been tested on humans as further research will be done to study Halicin as the researcher will be working with pharmaceutical companies and non-profit organization so as to develop a use case in human patients.
Furthermore, the Artificial Intelligence was able to scan through 100 million molecule to discover 23 molecules from the Zinc 15 database. The researchers said 8 molecules were active against antibacterial activity and two among the molecules were powerful against bacteria. Further research is being done on this.
In Conclusion
It will take humans months or probably years to screen through 100 million molecules before taking another set of years to come through with one drug but it took artificial intelligence 3 days to screen and find 23 drugs to treat antibacterial infection. This is a proof beyond doubt that in the nearest future with the help of Artificial intelligence, humans will be able to do a lot of thing that could not be achievable in the past faster and stress free.
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