The United Kingdom (UK) is moving to use artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle the rising spate of treatment resistant infections. The project, launched in collaboration with the Fleming Initiative and multinational pharmaceutical company, GSK, is a battle between superbugs and supercomputers with the aim of speeding up the discovery of fresh antibiotics and deliver new ways of killing other threats, including deadly fungal infections. The research found that overusing of antibiotics drives bacteria to evolve resistance to infections, which means new drugs are a priority.
It reported that superbugs kills around one million people a year globally and contribute to the deaths of millions more, with a prediction that the figures would continue to increase. Meanwhile, the collaboration to tackle the trend is estimated gulp £45million on six fields of research. Dr Andrew Edwards from Imperial College London said “this represents the single biggest investment in a UK antibiotic project I’m aware of.” He will be targeting AI at a tricky group of infections, called Gram-negative bacteria, that includes well known bugs such as E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae.
These species have an extra outer layer they use to control what gets in and out of a bacterium. Gram-negative species can block antibiotics from getting in and rapidly pump out those that penetrate the bacterial defences – making them tough to treat. The team will be performing experiments using molecules with different chemical structures and recording what can get inside and stay inside these bacteria. This data will then be fed into the AI so it can learn what it takes for an antibiotic to persist inside a Gram-negative bacterium.
