Traditionally, discovering an antibiotic takes about a decade and costs “easily more than a billion dollars,” Nodwell said. He was impressed with the team’s method, calling it a “harbinger for what’s coming in the future.”
“Finding a novel antibiotic against something like Acinetobacter, which is notoriously resistant, is a big deal,” he said - especially one that ignores other bacteria in the vicinity, a “terrible side effect” of most modern antibiotics. Justin Nodwell, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto who is unaffiliated with the study, found its results “really interesting.” “There are still many things about abaucin that we want to optimize and improve.” “It’s a long road between now and clinical trials,” he said. Now Stokes’s lab is working on tweaking abaucin to improve its potency and other medicinal qualities, in hopes it would eventually make it to clinics. “What we observed specifically was abaucin was able to suppress the severity of infection” compared to mice given current antibiotics or no treatment - promising results at this early stage, he said. “That’s the logic behind why we embarked on this project.”Īfter identifying the drug, Stokes’s team then tested abaucin on mice who had their wounds infected with Acinetobacter - a common way the bug spreads.
“Acinetobacter is one of the most, if not the most, urgent bacterial pathogens for which new antibiotics are required,” Stokes continued. Jonathan Stokes, an assistant professor of biochemistry at McMaster who led the study, told the Star his superbug target, a bacterium named Acinetobacter baumannii, is among the most dangerous and difficult-to-treat drug-resistant germs in the world. With advancements in AI and technology, however, humanity may eventually accelerate drug discovery by so much that bacteria can’t keep up, one of the study’s authors said.
A team of researchers, including several from McMaster University, used artificial intelligence to discover a promising new drug for a notoriously hard-to-treat, antibiotic-resistant “superbug.”Īccording to the study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, the lab’s AI was able to comb through thousands of molecules in mere hours to hone in on the drug - results the researchers say could revolutionize antibiotic drug discovery.Ĭurrently, humans are in a losing arms race against bacteria - the germs are evolving resistance to antibiotics at an alarming rate, far faster than new drugs could be developed.
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