Thanks, Neanderthals: How our ancient relatives could help find new antibiotics

The Rise of Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotics have revolutionized healthcare by treating various diseases, but the increasing resistance of bacteria to these drugs poses a silent pandemic. Without new classes of antibiotics since the 1980s, finding and testing new drugs has become expensive. However, researchers have employed machine learning to tackle this issue. By training a computer to execute Darwin's algorithm of evolution, scientists have developed more effective antibiotics. These computer-created antibiotics have shown promise in killing bacteria, even in clinical isolates. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in antibiotic discovery has expedited the process, allowing thousands of preclinical candidates to be identified in hours, compared to years in traditional methods.