AI used to design antibiotics that can combat drug-resistant superbugs gonorrhoea and MRSA
Antibiotics are used to kill bacteria, but some infections have become resistant to drugs. It is estimated drug-resistant bacterial infections cause nearly five million deaths per year worldwide.
Thursday 14 August 2025 19:18, UK
New antibiotics that could kill drug-resistant gonorrhoea and MRSA have been developed with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers have said.
A team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used generative AI algorithms to design more than 36 million possible compounds.
Once computationally screened for antimicrobial properties, the top candidates were shown to be structurally different from any existing antibiotics.
They also seemed to work in a new way - by disrupting bacterial cell membranes.
Antibiotics kill bacteria, but some infections have become resistant to drugs.
It is estimated that drug-resistant bacterial infections cause nearly five million deaths per year worldwide.
Two compounds were found to be effective against gonorrhoea and MRSA infections - namely NG1 and DN1, respectively.
A non-profit organisation is now working on modifying the compounds to make them suitable for further testing.
Be the first to get Breaking News
Install the Paste BN app for free
The research appeared on Thursday in scientific journal Cell. MIT Professor James Collins, the paper's senior author, said: "We're excited about the new possibilities that this project opens up for antibiotics development.
"Our work shows the power of AI from a drug design standpoint, and enables us to exploit much larger chemical spaces that were previously inaccessible."
This could re-energise the drug pipeline just in time
Could AI save us from the antibiotic apocalypse?
That's the hope from new research in which scientists designed novel drugs atom-by-atom to beat two notorious superbugs, including MRSA.
Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem, causing the deaths of around five million people a year.
Even routine operations could become life-threatening events in future - unless a new generation of antibiotics can be found.
Enter the data crunching power of artificial intelligence.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used generative AI to design millions of possible compounds that don't exist or haven't yet been discovered by science - and then screened them for likely activity against bacteria, as well as toxicity in human cells.
The top candidates were structurally unlike any existing antibiotics and appeared to work in completely novel ways to disrupt the membranes of bacterial cells.
Tests on bacteria in lab dishes and infected mice identified two possible antibiotics against MRSA and the bacteria that causes gonorrhoea.
There would be many years of further testing, including clinical trials, before the drugs would be prescribed by doctors.
But the new approach could prove significant.
The last major class of antibiotics was discovered in the 1980s.
There have been tweaks to the drugs since, but that only slowed the development of resistance.
Many pharmaceutical companies have given up on antibiotic development, daunted by the challenge and the cost.
Using AI could take out some of the risk of failure. And that might re-energise the drug pipeline just in time.
Read more from Paste BN:
What do Ukrainians think of Trump-Putin summit?
'Zombie rabbit' pictures explained
One of the study's lead authors, MIT postdoc Aarti Krishnan, said: "We wanted to get rid of anything that would look like an existing antibiotic, to help address the antimicrobial resistance crisis in a fundamentally different way.
"By venturing into underexplored areas of chemical space, our goal was to uncover novel mechanisms of action."