These diseases were thought to be incurable. Now AI is unlocking new treatments |
These diseases were thought to be incurable. Now AI is unlocking new treatments
From Parkinson's disease and antibiotic-resistant superbugs to rare lung conditions, artificial intelligence is inventing new drugs faster than many scientists dreamed possible.
For around half a century, humanity has been slowly losing its battle against bacteria. The most powerful weapons we have in this fight, antibiotics, are increasingly ineffective as drug resistance spreads. Around 1.1 million people now die every year from infections that were until recently easily treated. And the death toll is expected to rise to more than eight million by 2050 unless urgent action is taken.
Developing new antibiotics is a frustratingly slow and expensive process. Between 2017 and 2022, just 12 new antibiotics were approved for use, the majority of which were similar to existing drug-types that bacteria are already developing resistance to. The field has been chronically neglected due to a lack of interest from drug companies and underfunding.
But now researchers are looking to close the gap – and some are betting on artificial intelligence to help them do it.
"We can – in a matter of days or hours – look at massive libraries" of chemical compounds to identify those that display antibacterial activity, says James Collins, professor of medical engineering and science, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US. With the help of AI, Collins and his team have already discovered two new compounds that could prove vital weapons against the highly drug-resistant infections gonorrhoea and MRSA.
It is just one example of how AI is opening up a new era of drug discovery – promising progress on some of the most intractable medical problems of our time. Scientists are now pointing AI at conditions with no known cure such as Parkinson's Disease, and thousands of rare diseases, in the hope of new breakthroughs.
Collins and his team trained a generative AI model to recognise the chemical structures of known antibiotics. This allowed the algorithm to learn what it takes to kill bacteria. The researchers then used the AI to screen more than 45 million different chemical structures for their ability to target Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacteria that cause gonorrhoea, and Staphylococcus aureus, a significant source of infections in the form of MRSA.
Both of these bacteria are highly drug-resistant – in the case of gonorrhoea, it's able to evade almost every medicine used to treat it. There are now a dwindling number of antibiotics available – drugs of last resort – to wield against each.
Collins' method used AI to create entirely new compounds to target the bugs. In one approach, he selected a molecule as a starting point and used a combination of generative AI techniques to build it out, "adding bonds, atoms, substructures", he says. At each critical stage, the compound was scored by his trained AI model: "Is this looking like an antibiotic? Is it getting closer to a potential antibiotic?" Another approach involved dispensing with the starting compound and letting the AI freestyle from the beginning.
Collins and his colleagues designed 36 million compounds in this way with potential to work against the bacteria. The team selected 24 to synthesise in a laboratory. Seven proved to have some antimicrobial activity, and two were highly effective at killing strains of both bacteria that were resistant to other types of antibiotics.
Importantly, the compounds appear to target the bacteria in different ways to already existing antibiotics, raising hopes they could form a new class of medicines able to overcome the defences of drug-resistant bacteria. The two candidates are currently undergoing further testing.
Collins and his laboratory have previously used AI to discover other powerful new antibiotic compounds that kill a wide range of bacteria that are resistant to treatment, including Clostridium difficile, a common bowel infection, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes tuberculosis.
For some diseases, however, researchers don't have the luxury of drawing upon existing drugs to help them find new treatments. Instead, they need to start with what is known about the disease itself. In some cases, however, even that gives them little to go on.
Progress on Parkinson's
Parkinson's Disease was first identified in 1817, but more than two centuries later, there is still no treatment that slows the progression of the illness. There are more than 10 million Parkinson's patients worldwide, and rates are rising in countries with ageing populations. About one in 37 people in the UK will be diagnosed at some point in their lives. In the US, up to one million people........