Doctors used A.I to find the cure for this lethal bacteria, and it's only the beginning

Artificial intelligence. These two words are probably the most representative of the year 2023, which has been synonymous with the arrival of artificial intelligence into our daily lives. A.I. is becoming useful to pretty much everything, especially through ChatGPT, which a lot of people have tried out as soon as it became available.

Despite looking like a simple gadget at first glance, artificial intelligence could actually prove a lot more useful than just helping out high school students to write their essays. A.I. is now used by doctors and specialists to quicken the diagnosis process. It is taking a more prominent role in the future of medicine.

A.I. is an extraordinary time-saving tool

As the BBC reports in an article, Canadian and American scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, have used an A.I. to discover an antibiotic that is proving effective against a deadly species of superbug. This bacteria, known as Acinetobacter baumannii, can be very dangerous for humans, infecting wounds and triggering pneumonia.

So how did the experts go about it? They trained an A.I. to find an antibiotic by analyzing 6,680 compounds with unknown effects. Within an hour and a half, a short list had been compiled. In the process, 240 compounds found by the A.I. were tested by the doctors, who further reduced the list to 9. And they found the Holy Grail, a drug called abaucine, an antibiotic that could well eradicate the superbug in question.

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Will the drug be available by 2030?

But progress doesn't stop there, far from it. The drug still needs to be analyzed, tested and perfected. After that, it still needs to go through the clinical trial phase too. This antibiotic could therefore be available by 2030. Although it still has a long way to go before it becomes available to everyone, without the help of A.I., doctors might have taken years before finding it by themselves.

And these new AI-aided techniques could, of course, be used to detect other diseases and treat them more rapidly. We'll be keeping a close eye on all these advances!

Read more:This 'superbug' in pigs that can jump to humans is biggest global threat, according to WHO

This article has been translated from Gentside FR.

Sources used:

BBC: New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI

Nature Chemical Biology: Deep learning-guided discovery of an antibiotic targeting Acinetobacter baumannii