Using artificial intelligence, MIT researchers discovered compounds that effectively kill MRSA, a deadly bacterium, while being safe for human cells. Their work, making the AI’s predictive process transparent, marks a significant step in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.researchers have discovered a class of compounds that can kill a drug-resistant bacterium that causes more than 10,000 deaths in the United States every year.
Over the past several years, Collins and his colleagues in MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health have begun using deep learning to try to find new antibiotics. Their work has yielded potential drugs againstThese compounds were identified using deep learning models that can learn to identify chemical structures that are associated with antimicrobial activity.
“You can represent basically any molecule as a chemical structure, and also you tell the model if that chemical structure is antibacterial or not,” Wong says. “The model is trained on many examples like this. If you then give it any new molecule, a new arrangement of atoms and bonds, it can tell you a probability that that compound is predicted to be antibacterial.”
Experiments revealed that the compounds appear to kill bacteria by disrupting their ability to maintain an electrochemical gradient across their cell membranes. This gradient is needed for many critical cell functions, including the ability to produce ATP . An antibiotic candidate that Collins’ lab discovered in 2020, halicin, appears to work by a similar mechanism but is specific to Gram-negative bacteria . MRSA is a Gram-positive bacterium, with thicker cell walls.
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