a new class of antibiotics discovered using artificial intelligence

A first in 60 years. These new antibiotics will help fight resistant bacterial infections. It’s an American discovery.

Some Staphylococcus aureus infections are resistant to antibiotics. There are 150,000 each year in the European Union, causing 35,000 deaths, according to figures from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. And as there are currently only a few classes of antibiotics that remain effective against these resistant infections, the discovery [article en anglais dans la revue Nature] is promising.

The interest of artificial intelligence here is to have been able to virtually anticipate, from the chemical structure of tens of thousands of molecules, both possible antibacterial properties, and toxicity or not, on cells. human.

How algorithms can test drugs

Thanks to algorithms, researchers from MIT and Harvard were able to test 39,000 compounds and review 12 million substances already commercially available to try to see if there was, among them, a potential new antibiotic. Their model made it possible to isolate two molecules, which were then tested on mice and the results show that these compounds manage to divide by 10 the presence of resistant Staphylococcus aureus in the event of infection.

Thanks to AI, these researchers were able to identify a family of molecules which, until now, were not known for their antimicrobial activity. There are still several stages of clinical trials before validation, but this opens new avenues for pharmaceutical research, and not only for antibiotics.

Fighting against the overconsumption of antibiotics remains relevant

In the meantime, vigilance remains necessary regarding the overconsumption of antibiotics because by being exposed to these drugs, bacteria manage to develop defense mechanisms. This antibiotic resistance is responsible for more than a million deaths worldwide each year.

The solution is therefore to fight against the overconsumption of these medications which are, as the Ministry of Health regularly reminds us, useless against diseases of viral origin such as colds or the flu.

And France still has progress to make in this area, because we are the fifth largest consumers of antibiotics in Europe. We consume three times more than in the Netherlands or Austria.