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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This really impresses me. I have a background in this area of health, and I know that it takes years to make a discovery like this, and if you add up the at least 5 years of testing that the FDA requests to approve it and then market it, it's a long process.
3 days?
No doubt my friend @gbenga that what is coming is big. What worries me is that more and more control of the antibiotic use will be necessary, since the bacterial resistance is very strong nowadays. There is even already resistance to the latest generation of drugs... Let's see what comes with all this.
Another thing, it kills the agent that causes tuberculosis, this is great, the treatment for this disease is months or years, daily several pills, that is one of the reasons why most do not culminate it and again the disease occurs. This, I insist, is great. :-)
Thank you for sharing this information.
It is amazing the way bacteria become resistant to antibiotics but with Artificial intelligence playing a role in screening molecules, there will be discoveries of new antibiotics that can inhibit the growth of bacteria which were previously resistant to old antibiotics.
This news is quite interesting, I like to see that technology is used for the benefit of health. In part you have reminded me a bit of an old research project in which I participated a little, at that time I joined the Boinc distributed computing system and lent some of my computing power to medical research on specific proteins and antigens, it was a tiny thing on my part, but it seemed to me that some help was better than none, and the strength of the work was because of the number of people participating as a swarm.
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I am thinking now that it would be interesting to see in the future a union of both paths, AI and distributed computing ... That would be powerful and could be beneficial for the investigation of new topics and areas.
Thanks for reading my post, i also lent some of my computing power to Boinc so as to help with medical research. I am amazed with the level Artificial intelligence is helping in several sector.
AI is doing great but i think using this technology should be slowed down a little. Everyone wants to use AI and break through its abilities which is amazing but at the same time it should be handled with care and slowly so it won't make the labour force empty.
I guess there will be regulations soon about artificial-intelligence in the nearest future but for now, i think it is doing more of good so it might be hindering its function and purpose.
Hal! The good old Hal! But those machine tried to kill humans, to defend the spaceship. A strange way to choose a name.