Using AI, scientists find a drug that could combat drug-resistant infections

MIT News  May 25, 2023
Discovering new antibiotics against Acinetobacter baumannii, a pathogen that often displays multidrug resistance has proven challenging through conventional screening approaches. An international team of researchers (Canada, USA – MIT, Harvard University) screened ~7,500 molecules for those that inhibited the growth of A. baumannii in vitro and trained a neural network with this growth inhibition dataset and performed in silico predictions for structurally new molecules with activity against A. baumannii. They discovered abaucin, an antibacterial compound with narrow-spectrum activity against A. baumannii. Further investigations revealed that abaucin perturbs lipoprotein trafficking, and it could control an A. baumannii infection in a mouse wound model. This work highlights the utility of machine learning in antibiotic discovery and describes a promising lead with targeted activity against a challenging Gram-negative pathogen… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE 

Graphical abstract. Credit: Nature Chemical Biology (2023)