BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

How to feed the machine: lessons from an AI antibiotics study

A machine learning study uncovering a broad-spectrum antibiotic is a case study in matching models to data

March 13, 2020 9:11 PM UTC
Updated on Mar 13, 2020 at 10:41 PM UTC

The recent AI-based discovery of broad-spectrum antibiotic candidates highlights the potential of new machine learning methods to find compounds humans might otherwise miss, but ups the ante on the quality and diversity of input data needed to pull that off.

In silico compound screening's promise of shrinking drug discovery timelines and costs while improving hit rates could particularly benefit antibiotic development, a field where new entrants have to compete against cheap generics while combating the threat of drug resistance. ...